


Worlds Beyond Number

by kore_rising



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Inception Big Bang Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-17
Updated: 2012-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:44:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 54,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kore_rising/pseuds/kore_rising
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Worlds Beyond Number  
>  **Author:** [](http://kore-rising.livejournal.com/profile)[**kore_rising**](http://kore-rising.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Artist:** [](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/profile)[**cunning_croft**](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/)  
>  **Type:**  het, AU  
>  **Word Count:**  54,900  
>  **Rating:**  PG-15 to NC-17 for the later sections  
>  **Characters/Pairings:**  Ariadne/Arthur, Cobb/Mal  
>  **Warnings:**  mental illness, suicide, violence to the person, character death and some sexual content.  
>  **Summary:** DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.
> 
> The characters, setting and story of Inception are the property of Christopher Nolan and no cash is being made from this story.

 

[ ](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/217530.html)

**Link to full art post:[Here](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/217530.html) ** (please leave feedback for this incredible piece of work there, since this is nothing without it and [](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/profile)[**cunning_croft**](http://cunning-croft.livejournal.com/)  is brilliant.) 

  
~*~  
  
  
 _Dear Dr. Moss,  
  
I am writing to you as I am aware that while he was alive you frequently requested interviews with my uncle to discuss his work. I have recently taken over his affairs and estate due to his death and it has become clear that his papers, and so his contribution to the scientific community, belong in the hands of someone better suited to documenting and interpreting his work for posterity.  
  
These boxes hold my uncle's files from 1949-1957. I don't know exactly what they contain — nobody has been through them since before his death — but they are labelled as such, so I feel it is fair to assume they contain papers from this time. I hope that they may in some way aid your research.  
  
Yours sincerely,  
  
J.D. Miles_

* * *

 

Arthur Moss sat at his desk in his office, folding the letter in his hands slowly so the black inked words vanished into a pocket of creamy thick cartridge paper.

Anyone who might have expected him to be sitting in the room of an ivory tower, an office with book lined walls, a deep leather chair for him to hold forth from while his students hung on his every word, a heavy oak desk, and a window dressed with pretty streamers of ivy would have been severely disappointed. Light spilled in from the generously wide window, the chief beauty of the room which otherwise was a monument to the bland anonymity of office interior design. A tidy cube of space parcelled out into an area like a monk's cell, the buttermilk painted walls were pock marked and scuffed with age, while the industrial grade carpet, a mottled grey flecked with blues and greens, had obviously picked not to show the dirt. In defiance of this, the room’s attempt to basically turn him into pod person, Arthur had taken pains to assert his individuality, sometimes to the purse lipped disapproval of his superiors, who in turn appeared to him to have had their senses of humour surgically removed.

A pin board divided into quarters covered the wall behind him, its blue fabric was covered with a blizzard of notes, some pinned and carefully written, others scrawled onto post its and stapled into the fabric and one, noticeably just at the level of his shoulder, skewered under a small, wicked looking knife. It was familiar to his students as the one he used to play five finger fillet in his lecture on neuromuscular memory and aproprioception, spreading his fingers out as he challenged one of them to put their hand under his. They weren't to know it was blunt, but still, watching their faces it certainly put pay to any notions he might be a walk over.

To his right his shelves were equally organised, although a close eye would sometimes catch a copy of _The Dice Man_ or the collected _Calvin and Hobbes_ lined up with Jung, Freud, Adler, and Laing. This neatness was not for pleasure or personal foible — Arthur liked the ability to have knowledge within a fingertip's reach and he had long ago discovered that in a discipline as sprawling and unpredictable as his being structured his approach could only make his work simpler.

On the wall facing his desk hung two framed posters, the first one of Francis Bacon's self portraits, a swirl of flesh and hair split by a black tongue of paint; the second Escher's _Ascending and Descending_ , a riddle of straight lines twisting in the brain as the eye tried to untangle them. Sometimes he would sit and let his mind get lost in the loop as he tried to find the moment where up became down, a half waking state that sometimes granted him a clarity that sheer hard work and persistence could not. Next to his desk hung his most prized fencing trophy and beneath it the foil which he’d used in the match, the scars still showing on the blade and guard. He refused to be drawn on whether the fact that it pointed directly at his undergraduate teaching schedule and assignment list was deliberate or a coincidence, but any student mentioning it would be rewarded with a small, enigmatic smile and a raised eyebrow. “We tend to see the meaning that’s most relevant to us at any given moment,” he would remark. “Perhaps you want to put in some time at the library before next week?”

The only furniture in the small space was an ergonomic office chair that he'd managed to convince his department to go half with him for since he refused to tolerate the parade of broken rejects he’d borne for his first year; a battered old wooden file cabinet he'd rescued from a building refurbishment; and his equally vintage shabby desk, its flat wooden surface dark with age and reassuringly solid, the grain smooth under his fingers. He liked his things to have some personality, some substance, not just to be nice looking or easy on the brain, he would remark, pointing to Bacon’s portrait and hiding his chair behind his desk.

The end result of all this was that his students respected and liked him (albeit in a slightly nervous way), his colleagues were either amused or puzzled by him, but almost all had at some point asked each other privately how someone like Doctor Arthur Moss had come to be in their midst, working on his apparently never ending, exhaustingly and exhaustively researched complete history of shared dreaming.

 

As a college student Arthur had studied psychology. He'd eschewed the softer, more metaphysical areas of his subject, following instead the routes of neurochemistry and neuroanatomy — function and form over the more nebulous behaviour and symbolism. It was in his senior year that he'd first begun to learn in any depth about shared dreaming therapies, the PASIV and Somnacin variants intriguing him almost from the first time he'd read their names, lent over a book in a hushed library as it seemed a whole world broke open and blossomed inside his head. Of course he’d heard of shared dreaming; since it had been demilitarised and approved for supervised clinical use almost everyone had, lumping it jokily into the same slightly indulgent class as psychoanalysis and feng shui. Woody Allen had even made jokes about it in _Deconstructing Harry_. But it hadn’t been until then that he realised that dreams, the window into the unconscious so revered by Freud, Jung, and their disciples, could be created, manipulated, worked in even. Things could exist there that reality could not support. The human body could move, endure or shape in ways that gross flesh was incapable of doing. From the drops of information that existed at that time he built his senior thesis, impressing his teachers with his sharp analytical method and dedication to documenting what he saw as the evolution from psychoanalysis' subjective biases to the more objective method of shared dreaming therapies.

Since he'd graduated, taken his Masters and then his Doctorate he'd discovered that the work he'd done then (and subsequent to getting his PhD, in all honesty) had barely scraped the surface. He resolved that if he could convince the right school and the right department to accept him then he would write the first comprehensive history of shared dreaming, taking in the science and methodology as well as its cultural and social genesis. It would be the work of his life, he knew that and accepted it without pause no matter how pretentious he sometimes thought he sounded admitting it. But in the long dark coffee break of the soul, Arthur had faced himself and found he felt deeply and endlessly curious, passionate and intrigued about his subject. That plain and simple drive had kept him wedded to it when all others around him were telling him it was a niche inside a niche, a curiosity and nothing more, barely deserving of his talents.

So he had counted it a blessing when Colombia had accepted his application and granted him a generous portion of research time a week, on the basis he would continue to teach more workaday classes as required. For the last four years, as well as the five or so before then, he'd gone delving into the work of those early pioneers, their names becoming as familiar as his family's: Stephen Miles, Yusuf Kabir, Kintaro Saito, Dominick Cobb, and William Eames; their military supervisor General Michael Cobol; the supporting cast of players around them — Robert Fischer and his father, the Australian scientist Maurice Fischer; Marie and Mallorie Miles; Kagami, Akira, and Ito Saito. All had given rise to new generations, taking up the stories and knowledge of the one before. Arthur spent as much time seeking them out, pouring over photos taken by friends, scraps of letters and reports from their subsequent work, as he did tracing the genesis of each new Somnacin variant back to its parent and examining the design and function of the PASIV.

But he could only go so far, since while he could reach friends of friends, old colleagues and military archivists who were all more than happy to talk to him, those five men who had stood at the heart of this work refused his requests to so much as exchange notes. _We're old,_ they would say. _The past is the past, why do you want to disturb it? We can't tell you much you don't already know, surely?_ He'd been turned aside by all of them, and least gently of all by Miles, who had first been curt, then surly, then finally angry, cutting off contact with a waspish telephone call that quite belied his ninety four years, slamming the receiver down with a skull reverberating crash. They'd all declined, all except Dominick Cobb, who had vanished a decade after their work had finished, becoming a virtual recluse in the intervening years, and was now mostly likely dead. So Arthur had worked with what he had, picked out detail and organised hypotheses, weaving a history from the threads he could spin out of the scantest fibres.

 

Until now. On his desk sat four solid rectanglar boxes under a coat of dust that clung to his fingertips and puffed up like clouds of fairy floss when disturbed. Each one was dense and real as he might ever have hoped, heavy with the dry weight of paper and knowledge. He sat before them, leaning back on his chair as he tapped his lips with the letter. Overnight he had gone from scrabbling at the frayed edges quite possibly to the heart of the project, as if he had been granted a wish by some passing jinniyah. He was a starving man who had now had a sack of gold in his house. He realised he very probably should be running up and down the corridors of Schermerhorn, stripped to the waist with his tie tied around his forehead, kissing everyone from the Dean of Studies to Judy the housekeeper in sheer elation. If the day before he had been asked what might make his work better, more valid, give it greater scope, then the answer would have been something like this.

But having had it happen, to wake up and find the stars had aligned overhead and given him what he wanted for just once in his life — it was almost too much to take in alone. Sitting before what could be the biggest break of his career, Arthur reflected that what he needed and really didn’t have was someone to share this with. Academic research was solitary by it’s very nature, he’d always accepted that. But in his department he occupied the position of a chimera, a historioscientist interested in a field that barely registered for most others around him except as a sidebar to the science boom of the forties and fifties, usually drawing puzzled looks and confused conversations from his co workers. However, if he had had a colleague who shared his work it would have come with the worry of research being stolen or commandeered, an ever present fear in the stealthily competitive world of academia. Even his field was more a loose collection of individuals, each attacking it from their own specialism, be that chemistry, medicine, architecture, or engineering, scattered across the world in a random spatter. His family found his work rather more mystifying than admirable and tended not to make a secret of the fact it went right over their heads. His parents now tended to introduce him by warning people not to ask about his work after one too many Thanksgivings where Arthur, finding himself trapped by some allegedly well meaning elderly female relation asking about his marriage prospects, had proceeded to (apparently) completely seriously regale them with the finer points of the design of piston injection pumps.

 

Arthur carefully put the letter aside, stood up and took down the first box. He set the others neatly below the window in the order he'd received them, anxious not to disturb any continuity that they might have. He took a moment to clear off the dust layer, letting the breeze coming through the open window carry away the detritus of the passing years, then he settled back at his desk, placed the first box in front of him and eased off the lid. It came away with the resistance of paper long settled into shape by time and weight, a dry rasp of motion and a puff of aged air rising to meet him. He set the lid aside carefully, intending to use it as sorting tray, and took in his new acquisitions.

If he had been expecting a neatly catalogued and sorted box of Miles' papers (which he hadn't, but still, a man could dream) he would have been disappointed. The box was full of a slippery mass of loose and bound sheets, note and text books piled on top of each other in an unstable aggregation. Arthur took up the very top piece, a slightly creased page of yellow legal paper, and read in a loopy hand:

"...achieving routes into the unconscious mind requires a state similar to that achieved in deep hypnosis or when brain activity lowers to a high theta rhythm of approx. 8 Hz (see Green & Arduini re: hippocampal v. cortical EEG data). A lucid state that may be possible by using compound sedatives in conjunction with a hallucinogenic to stimulate the sensory pathways while engaging the right brain..."

The words broke off with a scribble, as if the pen had run out. He put it to one side and dipped in again. A bound report, metal clasps holding it together at the spine: _"Investigation into the role of acetylcholine inhibition re: The Chrysalis Project ."_ It was stamped with the DoD seal; Arthur had seen it mentioned before but having his own copy was something of a coup. He flicked the pages with a thumb, molecular diagrams and scientific drawings blurring past in blocks of text. He'd have to review it in more detail once cataloguing Miles' papers was done he resolved firmly, which was precisely what he should be doing, rather than simply rummaging like it was a lucky dip, no matter how eager he was to find out what he'd been gifted.

So Arthur forced himself to stop, take a deep breath and behave like an academic. Then he took out a fresh pad of paper from his file cabinet, dipped into his cup for a pen, tried very hard not to sigh in frustration, settled down and began to write.

 

* * *

 

By four that afternoon he had opened and examined almost all the contents of two boxes. His office floor now held a grid almost identical to the one on his wall, stacks of paper relating to the broad categories he'd assigned, then within them sub categories of source types. The makeshift catalogue now ran to twenty nine pages of numbered articles, followed by a brief description, each number attached on the corresponding item with a post it note. The mind numbing tedium of documenting, numbering and cataloguing would pay off, he decided, as he sat back and took it all in: it was like looking at a mountain or the moon, you could be desperate to explore it but unless you paced yourself sheer awe at its endurance, size and beauty compared to your brief self could overwhelm you before you began.

It also seemed to be paying dividends for the other, rather more prosaic reason that Miles seemed to have simply thrown everything connected to the project into these boxes, in some cases literally. Schematics and plans had been crumpled and dropped in under reports and subject interviews. Black and white photographs of the Miles property bookmarked texts on optical illusions and the collective unconscious. A series of proposed designs for the PASIV had yielded a note reading _"Mal, please ask your mother to cook a roast chicken for my birthday dinner this Sunday. I would also like a chocolate cake for dessert, love papa"_.

 

Arthur had held it between the fingers of one hand, reading Miles' sloping writing and something inside him felt unaccountably melancholy. Stephen Miles, the pioneer of dream share, had had a sweet tooth and liked his wife's roast chicken. In between building worlds and manipulating dreams he'd had birthday dinners and written notes to his daughter, signing himself papa. He had a web of affectionate ties around him, keeping him in place as surely as his work had and keeping him alive now he was gone. Arthur sighed, trying not to ask himself if the day would come when he too would sign himself papa or miss the taste of home cooking, and set the fragment aside on his desk. Thinking like this was a sure sign he needed a break.

 

He took a deep breath, reassuring himself that after this he would go for coffee and snacks, and reached for the last item in the box he was working on: a paper wrapped rectangle just a little smaller than his open hand measured from fingertips to wrist. It was solid and heavy enough that he could identify it as a book even before he unpacked it from its covering, which, when he opened it, appeared to be a half finished architectural drawing. He recognised the Miles' home, and in the corner a pair of initials, _DC_ , in a firm pencil. Then around that — Arthur frowned and leant closer — someone had drawn a faint heart shape, soft and smudged as if it had been sloppily erased. He noted the plan then refolded it and took up the book. A battered volume of fairy tales, its red cover greying and spotted with finger marks. He calmly opened the creaky cover and inside an ornate book plate informed him he was looking at the property of Mallorie Miles.

Arthur frowned to himself again. What little he (or in fact anyone) knew about Mallorie could be summed up in a handful of sentences. Only daughter of Stephen and Marie. Educated in France and the USA. Secretary to Miles during the Chrysalis Project, although heavily implied that she only had the job because of her father. Never married or linked to anyone romantically. Died in an accidental fall on the Miles' property aged twenty four. She was very much a minor figure, never appearing in anyone's recollection as more than lovely, exotic or spirited at best. The book must have been swept up by accident, Arthur decided, a childhood memento of hers or a keepsake of Miles' from after her death; a curiosity perhaps, but not of much use to him. Nonetheless he idly flicked through it, looking at the line illustrations of _Snow White_ , _Sleeping Beauty_ , and _The Frog Prince_ , wondering what he should do with something so personal when his thumb caught at something loose tucked into the pages, a frail triangle peeking proudly out.

The corner of paper slipped free smoothly when he cautiously pulled at it. It was slender, but too thick to be a single sheet. Arthur eased it out and found himself holding a long, rectangular envelope, its top torn and jagged where it had been opened hurriedly. It was addressed to Miss M. Miles, the letters printed neatly and clearly so there could be no confusion. The letter poked up from beyond the torn edge, the paper thin enough for him to see the hieroglyphs of the words inside. Curiosity tweaked at him. A hidden letter, like a treasure map or a wrapped present, was a puzzle that not even he could resist, even if he knew that it was most likely a note from a relative or someone equally polite and humdrum, probably used as a bookmark and forgotten.

Ever so gently Arthur eased the letter out and unfolded it, starting when something fluttered onto his desk. A tiny quartet of pressed and dried flowers lay there, their stalks bound with a fine thread and their colours long since faded to a dusty blue. Violets? Forget Me Nots? In a sudden flash of sentimentality Arthur took them up carefully and put them back in the envelope to protect them, smiling wryly to himself as he picked the letter back up and started to read.

 

_Dear Mal,_

_I am sorry to have to resort to writing to you when we see each other every day, but I know that unless I do we will never have the chance to talk properly or fully. It seems we are always in the company of the others, never unwatched or unsupervised and since we spoke all too briefly two days ago I have spent hours wondering if, or maybe even how, the idea of the layered dream might be possible. You spoke so clearly and strongly to me, listened to my ideas, that I can't help but tell you I want to talk more. I can't help but feel that we're only skimming the surface of an ocean when we could be diving under the waves to see what treasure is underneath — if only we took the chance to be bold and try. This is such a powerful thing we've uncovered; we're the inversion of Oppenheimer: "Now we are become Life, the creators of worlds."_

_If possible, I would like to ask your father if I might take you for coffee in town. We can talk there undisturbed, no one watching except for the local busybodies who will just see a man and a very beautiful woman on a date. Don't blush to see me tell you again that you're beautiful, like you did when I blurted it out like a fool at our first meeting. I thought it then and I still think it now, except that now I am aware that you are more than that, so much more: we, out of all of them, might hold the key to unlocking the real potential of this project and taking us from our single dream experiments into a new realm where we can really explore the unconscious._

_Dominick_

 

Arthur took a long, steadying breath as he finished reading, letting himself absorb the text before he allowed himself to react. Two points here were key. First, that as far as he was aware no relationship of any kind had ever been mentioned between Mallorie Miles and Dominick Cobb. In fact he'd never even heard that Cobb had noticed her, let alone taken her on a date: not a passing mention that Cobb had been kind or especially attentive around her. They were never even pictured together in the team photographs he'd seen, Mallorie seated with Miles standing behind her, Cobb usually frowning from the opposite end of the line of men. It was perfectly possible that this was just a youthful flirtation that went no further, a device to allow Dominick Cobb, who was five years Mallorie's senior, a chance to speak to a girl he liked. A little soft flattery and some charming words designed to ease his way, complimenting her looks and intelligence with fumblehanded grace. She'd not taken it further, perhaps out of respect for her father and his reputation, but kept the letter, liking its compliments. That was perfectly and logically possible, he reasoned.

But secondly and more importantly (Arthur felt his heart beat just a fraction faster): Cobb referred to layered dreaming in his letter. Dreams within dreams or stacked on top of each other in a Jacob's Ladder was something that had been dismissed long ago as a technical and theoretical impossibility; Miles himself even went so far as to call it ridiculous in a few documents, stating it could not be achieved and should not be actively pursued. But even now whispers crept out of the potential to explore into the deepest recesses of the mind, out into raw unconscious space. Had Cobb known something and felt he could only share it with Mallorie? Cobb was regarded as something of a enfant terrible inside the project, that much Arthur knew: brilliant but prone to fits of temper, taken under Miles' wing as his assistant architect, producing a series of now well documented plans that were still seen as the epitome of classic dream design. As unlikely as it might be, could Cobb have pursued either Mallorie or layered dreaming? It would be a revelation in either case, perhaps offering a new explanation as to why the core group had broken up late in 1956, never to reform, or how layered dreaming theories had come to be a dead end. Providing of course he could find the evidence to support it beyond a mildly flirtatious note, he chided himself, trying to quell the excitement agitating in the back of his mind.

As things stood, he knew very little about Dominick Cobb beyond his minor relationship with the Chrysalis Project, partly because that was where Arthur's interest lay and partly because as far as he was concerned, the trail was well trodden and very little new was to be found down it. But he knew that others in his field had studied Cobb's life and work as a whole; in fact he was fairly sure he'd been sent a new book about Cobb's architectural work and influences only a few months ago. Something that had been given glowing reviews and much fanfare. Stork legged and toed, Arthur picked his way through the papery obstacles on his floor to his book case, muttering to himself as he ran his fingers over the ripple of spines: "Cobb, Cobb, Cobb; Dom-In-Ick Cobb...Aha!"

The book was matte white, printed with a grey outline of a maze on its cover. _Dreaming Spires: The Architectural Influence of Dominick Cobb_ it read in lightly raised print, then in a smaller face underneath _Dr. Ariadne Portier_. Ah, Arthur smiled to himself as he turned the book over to read the outline, that was why he remembered: Ariadne Portier, the wunderkind of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture. A fierce intelligence by all accounts: her lecture series to support her book, which was in fact her much expanded PhD thesis if he'd heard correctly, had been sold out and wildly popular both in the academic community and with the general public, although he'd also heard snide whispers that her youth and looks had been helpful in achieving that (not that the book bore a picture that he could decide from). He'd been invited to her New York lecture but hadn't attended; he'd been on a blind date with a blonde day trader who spent most of the meal talking at him in a hyperbolic monologue about her ex, her therapist, and her friends while she simultaneously chewed down a salad. Once finished with both she stood, smiled, and coyly asked if he wanted to come back to her apartment for a nightcap. Arthur had been so stunned that she'd finally let him speak he gaped at her then answered: "Honestly? I think you'd be better off krazy glueing your vibrator to your answering machine," before he threw his napkin aside and left.

 

He pushed the memory aside with a sour grimace, turning back to the question at hand. It appeared that if anyone could tell him definitively about Dominick Cobb it would be Ariadne Portier, since she was the most recent person to have made such an in depth study of his life and work. He'd heard little about her since the lecture tour and book, and knowing academia like he did, that meant she was either deep into a new project or fishing for something new. Hopefully he would catch her in the latter state, ready to be tempted by this tidbit. He smiled again as took Dr. Portier's book, negotiated his way back to his desk and woke up his computer with a nudge of the mouse. All in all it had proved to be a very interesting and extremely lucky day.

 

* * *

 

When the knock came on his door Arthur called "Come in!" without thinking, then sharply as the sound of wood hitting paper made his skin chill, "Carefully!"

 

"Fuck, Arthur, what the hell are you doing?" The usually soft voice of Dr. Jack Nash was rich with agitation as he grimaced, sidled and hopscotched across Arthur's office towards his desk, his arms spread as he tried not to spill liquid from the two steaming mugs he was carrying. "Are you designing a maze for the inherited skills study? Shall I go and get the rats?" He set the cups down with a sigh of relief, turning around to examine the towers of materials arranged on the floor.

"Not unless they knew Stephen Miles." Arthur picked up his drink and sniffed the fresh coffee appreciatively.

"Seriously, man, what is all this?" Nash bent down and peered at one of the stacks of paper, fanning the top sheets with a frown.

"Stephen Miles died and his family sent me his papers." Arthur sat back with a carefully neutral expression as Nash went wide eyed, straightening up in shock.

"No way. I was sure that ornery old cuss was going to make a century. Wow...and this is all his?" Arthur nodded. "Wow." Nash chuckled again. "You lucky son of a bitch. So, anything good in all this? Have you found anything juicy?" He raised his eyebrows suggestively as he picked up his drink and perched on the window sill, crossing his legs and leaning back against the glass with an easy grin.

 

Arthur hesitated, his hand going unconsciously to the drawer where he'd locked the fairy tale book, the plan and the letter the night before. He and Nash were — not friends, but they were as close as academic competitiveness allowed them to be, admittedly more at Nash’s instigation than his own. Nash was a bright star compared to his rather weak glow. He'd spent time studying in the UK, co-authoring a major study on perception and acquisition of superstitious behavior; his PhD had been on sensory systems and linguistic relativity and he was considered charming, a good looking geek, if the administration office was to be believed. Arthur felt he should hate him, being that Nash had such a huge advantage and preference over him, but instead he found himself first the object of his friendliness and sly wit, then surprised when Nash professed an envy of Arthur's work on dream sharing. Arthur could still recall the night that they'd sat propped up over a forest of beer bottles as Nash's smile wavered in the bar lights, his voice stupid with drink as he mumbled, "You're so, so lucky man. So lucky. I fuck up, everyone lands on my ass. Every shithead from here to Cape Horn has a damn opinion on why I'm getting shit wrong. But you? You're your own boss. You're the boss of you. No one knows more than you so you can tell them to go fuck themselves sideways with a copy of Dom Cobb's basic designs. You're on the edge. On the razor's fucking edge," his finger wove a curve in the air, "and cool as a fucking cucumber. One day, I swear, one day you're going to blow our fucking minds." He grabbed his beer and took a messy gulp as Arthur looked at his serious face, his eyes hard and his brow tight as he swallowed. It was that expression he was thinking of now, smeared over with an alcoholic fog yet still razor tipped. It had been that that had made the seed of his disquiet around Nash and his motives grow into watchful caution: even if Arthur could never fully put his finger on the cause of his discomfort around Jack Nash, but he never failed to heed it.

 

"Yeah." Arthur smiled self-deprecatingly for Nash's benefit. "I'm not done looking through all his stuff yet. I've got another box or so to go."

"You need some help?" he asked just a fraction too quickly.

"No, I'm OK." Arthur leant back in his chair, hoping he looked more casual than the tingle in his stomach was letting him be. "I've got it under control. Anyway, I've got someone coming in to assess the significance of the collection so I can get a second opinion. Just to make sure I haven't over looked anything," he added hurriedly when Nash's eyebrows rose curiously. It was only a half lie, Arthur told himself. He'd e-mailed Dr. Portier last night with a tentative invitation and a copy of his incomplete, rough catalogue. He'd thought of including a scan of the letter, but something had made him want to offer that to her in person. He couldn't explain it to himself, except maybe that the urge to place it in her hands would make it more concrete in his own mind.

 

"Really? Who?" Nash leant back, the trees behind him a wild green mass of wind shaken leaves, as if they were reflecting Arthur's own internal agitation.

"Dr. Ariadne Portier, the Dominick Cobb expert," Arthur added when Nash stared at him.

"Wow." Nash shook his head. "Old ghosts coming home to roost." He stared into his coffee as Arthur gaped at him this time.

"Do you know her?"

"Know her?" Nash laughed dryly, "Yeah, I guess I do. I dated her for a little while, while I was working in London and she was there researching in the British Library. She's good," he said quickly, seeing Arthur's face shift into stiff neutrality, "at her work. Very precise; very rigorous; doesn't like idiots or excuses or doing things sloppily; dedicated; quite single minded," he trailed off slowly and wistfully, "pretty; petite; lots of dark, wavy hair and light brown eyes. Slender bones." He half lowered his eyelids as if recalling something pleasant. Arthur tried to let the strange prickle in his throat subside. He wasn't jealous, was he? Or did he resent the fact that Nash had to have got to everything before him, be that respect, academic acclaim or the attention of a woman he'd not even met?

"She sounds very pleasant," Arthur forced out his reply as Nash raised his head with a bright smile.

"Yeah, she's OK. You'll probably get on just fine. Although she might not like your sense of humour," he amended, throwing a meaningful glance at Arthur’s fencing foil and then Bacon’s head. "She's not great at relaxing and kicking back, you know?" He gulped down the last of his coffee and drew himself up. "Anyway, duty calls. Not all of us are as lucky as you," he sighed with overt drama as he began to pick his way back to the door. 

 

Arthur casually flipped him the bird with a wry smile and turned his attention back to his reading of one of Miles' notebooks. "Oh, and give Ariadne my best when you talk to her, yeah?" Nash called from by the door.

"Sure." Arthur didn't look up when he replied, not wanting to look at Nash's expression as he spoke.

"Thanks man. Come by and see me later." The door closed and he listened to Nash walk away, trying to understand the irritation suddenly gnawing at his nerves. So what if he'd dated her? It didn't mean anything. Nash had dated a lot of women and made no bones about it. Arthur pushed his work back with an annoyed hand and glared at Francis Bacon's head. The discovery of the letter had thrown him for a loop and turned him into a borderline crazy person, he cursed. Nash wasn't going to steal this from under him, nor was Dr. Portier going to act as some kind of Mata Hari of dreamshare. He needed her help as a Cobb scholar, not as some way of scoring one over Nash. But still, some stupid, juvenile part of him had wanted Nash to be impressed he was working with her; not to casually say that he'd been there and done that or, worse, for them to tag team and poach this right from under him.

 

"Fuck," Arthur said to Bacon with venom, turning away and slapping his mouse across the desk to wake his computer. Maybe she'd e-mailed him a reply by now.

 

* * *

_Dear Dr. Moss,_

_Thank you for your email. Having not been aware of it, I will say that your work sounds intriguing and I'm flattered that you've come to me for advice with regard to Dominick Cobb's early work._

_I am currently finishing a project, so I'm free to come and examine the collection in approximately a week, by which time you should have completed a fuller cataloguing and be able to show me a better overview of Miles' collated papers and all Cobb's contribution. Please contact me as soon as possible if this is acceptable to you so that I can make the required arrangements._

_Dr. A. Portier_

 

* * *

Arthur had planned to meet Ariadne Portier at JFK. In fact he'd sent her an email to that effect, once he'd established that she was coming and was prepared to help him. But she'd declined in rather brisk reply, saying that she would be taking a cab to her hotel, then recovering from her journey before she was prepared to meet with him, effectively dismissing any notions that she was in need of chivalry or care. So on the appointed day he'd arrived at his office early instead. He reorganised Stephen's papers for the final time, placing the most Cobb centric items to the fore. He tidied his space and unearthed his coffee maker, setting it up on top of his filing cabinet with a pair of mugs, a sugar dish and spoons, reminding himself to check the departmental refrigerator for cream and milk. He was swiping at the dust on his window sill when Nash knocked and stuck his head around the door, wolf whistling as he took Arthur in.

 

"Today's the day, right?" He smiled hugely as Arthur turned around. "Looking sharp, my man. I like the suit." Nash sauntered in, looking him up and down and taking in the dark grey three piece Arthur had had cleaned for the occasion, the freshly pressed pin striped shirt, and wine red tie with a woven pattern of interlocking diamonds and tiny fleur de lys..

"I just want to make a good impression. This is hardly the most well regarded area of research, so looking like Oscar the Grouch while I spiel on about shared dreams probably wouldn't help me." Arthur smoothed his vest down with his palm. Perhaps it was a bit too formal, even if it was only a notch up from his usual office attire of slacks, shirt, tie and sweater. Damn it, perhaps he should take it off, roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie a little —

"I don't know. I think you could rock the green furry costume any time."

"Fuck off." Arthur tossed a ball of scrap paper at Nash's grinning face which he neatly dodged.

"Well, she'll probably love it. You know what they say: every girl's crazy for a sharp dressed man." He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. "She'll want more than a collaboration when she sees you like that."

"Unlike you were, I am interested in a real meeting of minds," Arthur replied with hauteur that made Nash snigger. "Not getting in her pants."

"Sure? Have you seen what she looks like?" Nash whistled again. "And how long is it since you got laid so hard you thought you were the carpet?"

"Not interested," Arthur repeated firmly. "This is about research and sharing knowledge."

"Not at all?"

"No."

"Not even if she jumps you?"

"Not even if she comes in here, does a little strip tease, wiggles her ass at me and tells me to take her over my desk, OK?"

 

"I'm very glad to hear that." A precise female voice with the softest hint of a French accent spoke clearly from the doorway, making Arthur turn in surprise.

 

Watching him and Nash was a slim, small woman dressed in a rust red jacket over a white and blue striped shirt, a grey vest and slim fitting grey pants. Her hair was loose around her face, dark brown and shiny as it fell down to her shoulders in soft waves. Her hands were jammed in her pockets as she looked at him with her huge brown eyes, her full mouth set in a firm line as if she was making her mind up whether to smile or frown. She was carrying a leather satchel at her side and around her neck was draped a printed scarf. Her head tilted to one side as she pinned Arthur with a look, her jaw set as she regarded him. "Doctor Arthur Moss?" she said, advancing with a single long stride, her hand coming out for him to shake. "I’m Ariadne Portier."

 

"It's a pleasure." Arthur pressed his palm against hers, feeling the tight squeeze of her fingers while scrambling through the panic clouding his brain for a polite way to apologise for what she might have heard, but only coming up with the fact that she was pretty, so fucking pretty and he'd just fucking made an idiot of himself in front of her. "I'm sorry, we were just discussing —"

 

"That's fine, I understand," she sliced off his words before he could finish, pulling her hand from his as she turned towards Nash. "Hello, John. Are you well?" Her voice didn't alter, nor did she offer him her hand.

"Very, Ariadne, and yourself?" Nash was equally neutral.

"I'm fine," she nodded, looking him up and down before dismissing him and switching back to Arthur. "Is Doctor Nash consulting with us? I would have appreciated being told if he was, since as far as I am aware this isn't his specialty." Arthur caught Nash's eye over Ariadne's head, watching as he made a rapid negative sign with his hands.

"No, Jack, I mean Doctor Nash is a colleague of mine," he started firmly.

"And I was just leaving," Nash finished clearly, backing up and reaching for the door handle. "Thanks for the talk, Arthur. We'll catch up later, OK?" He beamed again, then slammed the door, leaving Arthur facing the intent look of Ariadne Portier as it held him down like a bug under a pin.

 

"I'm sorry about that. Doctor Nash and I," he started but she cut him off again, leaving Arthur disconcerted at her sharpness and wondering if she was always like this or only with those she had just met.

"Really, you don't have to explain. I knew John in London and I'm well aware of what he can be like." She glanced around his office curiously, stopping at the Escher and Bacon prints briefly before coming back to him. "So, you said you had some things that you needed my help with."

Arthur nodded, and directed her to the guest chair he'd scavenged up for her visit. She dropped her bag and scooted up to his desk, planting her elbows on it as he started to make coffee. The appliance sputtered and hissed as he busied himself with their cups, trying to decide if he should produce the letter immediately or ease it into their discussion. Instead he opted for: "Cream and sugar?"

Ariadne barely looked up from the book she'd plucked from his desk and started flicking through, heedless of his bookmarks and annotations. "Both, please."

 

Arthur quelled his curiosity and mild irritation at her manner, fixing their drinks and settling in his own chair, watching her lean back and cross her legs as he sat down with a polite smile. Perhaps smoothing out her unfortunate first impression of him with some cool charm would be more productive.

 

"Thank you for coming to see me. I'm very grateful you've spared the time to lend me your expertise over this." He watched her watching him from behind her coffee cup, holding it in front of the lower half of her face like a courtesan's fan. She didn't speak so he plunged on. "I wanted to ask you some things about Dominick Cobb and his time at the Chrysalis Project, particularly about his relationship with some of the other team members."

Ariadne frowned for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. "Anyone in particular? He was close to Miles, but then that's very well known. He was seen as Miles' successor, as I'm sure you know. They shared a similar aesthetic and it’s partly from Miles' work that he derived the first set of basic dream layouts that are still used today."

"Were they always close?" Arthur watched her sip her drink before she replied. Her eyes were disconcertingly direct and sharp as they met his, unwavering and clear as deep amber, ringed with long, dark, thick lashes.

"Yes, ever since they were introduced by Stephen's old mentor. He was teaching Cobb at the time, as part of the postgraduate program at Cornell. They stayed close until after Miles' daughter died, but then Cobb was growing away from him professionally and had been for a while. It was probably just the opportunity he wanted, if his notebooks are to be believed. If you're thinking of anyone else, he was on friendly terms with Robert Fischer and to a lesser extent with Will Eames, but he had a reputation as being a loose cannon and that kept him pretty isolated from some of his colleagues." She pinned him back down with her eyes narrowing. "Were you thinking of anyone else?"

 

"What about Mallorie Miles? Did he know her?" Arthur raised his eyebrows as she blinked, looking perturbed for a few seconds. "Beyond being a casual acquaintance. Do you have any idea if he might have been interested in her? Romantically, I mean."

"Mal?" Ariadne bit the inside of her cheek as she thought. "He makes no direct mention of her in his notebooks. Will Eames and Yusuf Kabir didn't say anything when I interviewed them either, although they did mention Mal in passing..."

 

Arthur felt a hot stab of jealousy. How the hell had she managed that? They'd been refusing him for years.

"You spoke with Eames and Yusuf?" he said, trying not to sound as bruised as he felt.

"Yes. Discretely, of course.” Her back straightened and her chin rose as she bit the words off and fired them back towards him.

 

Arthur paused, watching her and wondering if what he was seeing was a simple defence mechanism to being a young woman in fiercely competitive and politically potholed world or something more complex. God knew how he was going to cope working with her even for a few hours if she jumped down his throat at every opportunity. But against that wariness was a sense of curiosity, a spark of fellow feeling he'd never experienced before, and that made him want to persist where others may simply have been repelled. All that aside, at this moment it was her expertise he needed and in any case if this was a pissing contest there was no doubt who was the winner. So he capitulated as gracefully as he could.

 

"I'm not in any doubt about that," he replied firmly, "and I am not questioning your commitment or your maturity. But these men rarely talk to anyone, let alone scholars interested in dream share." Ariadne seemed to acquiesce a little at his placating words, settling back in her chair as he continued. "What did they say about her?"

"That she was pretty, exotic, very bright, devoted to her father." Ariadne sighed. “Nothing new." Arthur swore to himself as he felt his spine slump a little. "Although —" she continued cautiously, "Will Eames did say something about her playing dumb. I could never decide if he meant she was playing stupid or as if she had no voice. He said it when I was asking about Cobb and Miles' design process. They would stand at a drawing board together and sketch, like one mind with four hands, working over each other's lines if they had to. Mal would sit next to the board and make notes as they talked and drew, so they could refer back to their ideas as they went. I asked Eames if she ever suggested anything, since she had worked with her father since she'd left college and I thought she must have absorbed some of his expertise. He said that she generally played dumb. That was all." Ariadne shrugged. “But nothing I’ve seen in the sources leads me to believe she was closer to Dominick Cobb than as her father’s assistant, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

 

Arthur drummed his fingers lightly against the surface of his desk as Ariadne watched him keenly. He knew as well as she did what that meant; without a direct line of evidence that could be corroborated the letter was just a dead end, no matter who wrote it and what it mentioned. Better to put his energies into the meat of the work, not meander off down a side road chasing some ridiculous notion that had long been declared impossible. A dream within a dream — who was he fooling?

 

“Doctor Moss?” Ariadne prompted him from across the desk,

“Pardon me.” He snapped to attention. “Please, Doctor Portier, call me Arthur. Only my parents refer to me as Doctor Moss and that’s usually when they’re trying to impress people.” He raised his eyebrows with knowing emphasis, but Ariadne Portier didn’t crack.

“If you would prefer that,” was all she said, a shade stiffly.

No reciprocation, no smile, but still — Arthur swallowed his curiosity and continued. “I would. I have some articles that it would be useful if you could examine for me. Plans, a couple of procedural documents — you’ll be given full credit in any later publication of course.”

 

He took the bundle of Cobb related papers from his desk and placed them in front of her, watching as she smiled slightly, pushed her coffee aside and took up the first plan, making to spread it out, only to frown.

“We‘ll need some more space,” she said firmly and without another word began to clear his table with a methodical hand, giving him little choice but to help. Once done she opened the paper, smoothing it gently as she looked down. “Ah.” She smiled, open and pleased with what she saw. “Look, this is one of the mazes.” Her fingertips touched the lines jutting into corners and as they followed it. “This building is modeled on a skyscraper, multiple floors, repeating structures. It’s got such an economy of design, such a clean aesthetic. It’s so precise, even for something that never existed in the real world. This is just what I’d expect from Cobb and Miles working together.” She leant closer, scanning the handwritten notes that patched around the plan.

 

“Have you seen this before?” Arthur watched her frown again.

“No, not exactly like this. It’s not new, if that’s what you’re asking me. It’s an early version of one of the standard buildings, probably intended for the city layout.”

“I am aware of the standardized dream designs, Doctor,” he said with a faint smile as she peered up at him, her expression slipping.

“Sorry, I’m used to explaining things to people who are clueless about all of this.” She looked down again, reading the notes. “This here is definitely Cobb.” Her left hand circled an intricate staircase then stretched to join it to a smatter of writing. “See?” Arthur looked over, trying to recall if it looked like the letter:

"After Penrose, simplified to three rotations. Robert recalls linear designs better if structured within familiar objects."

“While this —” she tapped a vaulted ceiling in the central space, the area designed for the subjects to work, “— this is Miles’. Post-modernist, just a little Gothic.”

“Not like Cobb?”

“No, Cobb was a romantic left to himself.” She smiled again. “He absorbed so much of the futurist school that he came out the other side. He wanted to make beautiful machines for living, not just functional ones. Miles encouraged him to look at Oriental and Asian design as a result. He travelled briefly to Japan with Kintaro Saito and made a whole volume of sketches which are simply amazing.” She trailed off as she skimmed over the plan again and it seemed to Arthur that her mind had switched up a gear, some private efficient mode that no longer saw him or the room as anything more than hazy outlines. All that was real to her now were the documents and the glimpses they granted into the minds of men long gone.

“Look at this,” she said again, and he leant over her shoulder, letting her absorption carry him into her mind.

 

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For warnings and disclaimers- see chapter one

~*~  
  
For three long, excellent weeks Ariadne was his work companion and for Arthur it was akin to having a blast of cool air refreshing his mind. Having worked alone and largely unnoticed, barely published and therefore unregarded for so long, to find another academic whom he could talk freely and without having to stop every five minutes to explain himself, was liberating. As for Ariadne herself, the initial distrust he had felt at her previous relationship with Jack Nash was soon put paid to: she largely ignored him except for pleasantries, despite Nash’s attempts to befriend her with the same techniques he used on Arthur, even going so far as to suggest the three of them hit a bar and catch up. Her expression had soured at the suggestion. “I’m busy and don’t have the time. Doctor Moss?” Her eyes caught his with just the faintest quirk of the eyebrows, waiting for his answer. He wasn’t the only one who watched other’s reactions to Nash then; interesting, he mused.  
  
“No,” Arthur said. “Sorry. Some other time, maybe.” He picked up his lunch bag and left the kitchenette without another word, only realizing Ariadne was right behind him when he almost let his office door slam in her face.  
  
  
Their days fell quickly into an easy rhythm. He would arrive at 8.30am to find her waiting at his office door, patiently reading as he hurried down the corridor to greet her. He would prepare coffee while she shed her outside clothes, revealing another gently bohemian and firmly androgynous outfit. She was always covered from the base of her neck down, only her face and hands not enclosed in two or more layers of fabric. Spring in New York was cold and damp, but this was a heated building, Arthur would think as he idly noted her boots, thick cords, heavy leather belt, waistcoat, long sleeve button down over t shirt and scarf wrapped around her throat. She wore her hair down and loose, but much as a young girl might, bunching it away from her face or letting it fall any which way in its wavy layers. She was lovely, a dark, liquid beauty that he’d have to have been blind and stupid to miss, but she belied it with her spiky, jabbing manner that doubtless had punctured egos and collapsed would be seducers all around her lecture circuit. She stayed sharp and crisp with him, but he could feel a slackening off of her initial hardass behavior. Something in her seemed to enjoy their joint work, the hours pouring over documents and discussing their implications, arguing freely over details as they made their way to order lunch time sandwiches and then all the way back again.  
  
  
Perhaps it was that détente that led him to finally share the book and Cobb’s letter with her. He’d been weighing up the matter in his mind for days and it was only when he’d shown her the plan it had been wrapped in that he realized he was ready to let her examine it.  
  
“I have another document that I’d like you to see.”  
  
Arthur reached into his desk drawer and took out the red fairy tale book, opening it in front of him and taking the letter from between the pages. He held it out to Ariadne as if it was a challenge, letting her take it and cautiously unfold it. He sat and watched her read, her eyes working across the page once, then again, her eyebrows raising as she sat there. "Do you, in your expert opinion, think Dominick Cobb wrote that letter?" he asked when she looked up at him.  
  
"I would need to check it against contemporaneous handwriting samples," she said cautiously.  
  
"And his mentions of layered dreaming?" Arthur pressed.  
  
"Its certainly consistent with some of the things he wrote prior to 1955. He was the biggest advocate of the theory until he left the Chrysalis Project, that's proven in his papers and published articles. But if you’re asking me to speculate about the person this is addressed to...” She looked up at him and shook her head. “As I’ve already mentioned to you we have no way of proving he might have developed anything with Mallorie's help or had a relationship with her."  
  
"But what if he had?” Arthur countered. “You said yourself Mallorie was bright and must have absorbed some of her father's knowledge. She was present at every stage of the project he was. What if she talked with Cobb? What if they found some proof?"  
  
"This is pure speculation based on a single letter," Ariadne said sharply.  
  
"Is there nothing in his notes?" Arthur watched her eyes flicker away from his. "What is it? Ariadne, please."  
  
"May I see the book?" she said eventually, putting her hand out and sliding it across the desk to rest in front of her. He watched her as she fanned the pages slowly, staring at the flickering blocks of text and engravings as they whipped by.  
  
  
"What are you looking for?"  
  
She didn't reply, instead opening the covers and running her fingers over the end papers gently, stopping at the middle and seeming to draw a circle in the centre.  
  
"I don't believe it," she said softly to herself, then her head snapped up and she demanded, "Do you have a knife? Or a pair of scissors?"  
  
"Tell me what you're doing then I might trust you with a bladed object," Arthur shot back at her.  
  
  
"Here." She reached out and grabbed his hand, dragging it over to her side of the desk and slapping it down over the paper. "Feel that?" Arthur pressed down and a faint series of ridges met his cautious palm. "It's a classical labyrinth. Cobb used it as psyche distraction method in his dream designs. Every structure is placed in or is part of a maze. He draws it countless times in his notes, saying he's amazed how it looks like the folds of the cerebral hemispheres." Arthur pulled the book back towards him, tracing the lines as she had and looking down at the paper as he did so. "He mentions over and over that the puzzle is the key to unlocking the unconscious. The mind wants to solve the riddle and discover what is hidden in the centre."  
  
"Do you think Cobb put it here?" he asked. One corner of the end paper was loose, catching his index finger as he passed over it.  
  
"One of his notebooks had something like this," Ariadne was saying as he frowned at the ragged edge. "I wanted to take it out and compare it in the light."  
  
  
Arthur pinched the paper corner between his finger and thumb and gently pulled, barely hearing her as it lifted a little when he tugged experimentally. He had seen something once, he recalled vaguely, an engraving concealed in the cover of a book that had previously been considered worthless. Someone had damaged the spine by accident and when they'd looked inside it had been sown in against the pages, safe and sound. He pulled the paper again, just enough to get the feeling it was begin to unstick.  
  
"What are you doing? You could damage it," Ariadne snapped.  
  
  
Arthur ignored her, gently working at it as the layer started to peel back with a soft rasp, his confidence increasing when it pulled away from the cover in a clean, whole piece — linen paper, perhaps? He found himself wondering at its strength: there was a slight resistance as he had maybe a quarter of the page freed, a moment when it seemed to stick completely, then there was a muffled pop and a square of cardboard emerged from the backing, inch by inch as he worked the end paper free, finally lifting everything clear away and leaving the guts of the book exposed. Ariadne leant towards him as he reached out and touched the shallow cavity he'd revealed, cut neatly into the hardback cover. Lying inside it was a cream envelope, clearly addressed in a tidy cursive to Dominick Cobb.  
  
  
Arthur hardly dared take a breath as Ariadne put her fingertips against the paper and pulled it free.  
  
  
"My god," she said softly, as with her careful action what had appeared to be a single envelope came out as a small packet, full of folded papers that crinkled in her grasp. They looked at each other, speechless for a long moment, until Arthur felt himself start to grin at her.  
  
"I should try the other side. They might have hidden something in there."  
  
  
Ariadne huffed out a strange laugh, leaning over the desk as Arthur flipped the back cover flat, pushing her fingers eagerly against the spine as he rummaged an Exacto knife out of his desk drawer. She held the book still as he slit the paper's edges with the blade and equally gently freed it. He felt them both holding their breath as it came away, the glee squirming inside him as it revealed another compartment, this with a bundle of thin sheets tied with a slim red ribbon, handwriting sqiggles faintly visible within.  
  
He looked up at Ariadne's disbelieving face as she stared back at him. Her eyes were wide, her brow furrowed and her lips parted, as if she was warring between incredulity and jubilation. "Jackpot," he wanted to giggle at her, but restrained himself in the name of his own credibility. He tenderly lifted the papers free, feeling the decades dry paper caressing his fingertips, and laid them on the desk between them next to where Ariadne had put the envelope, pushing the ruins of the book carefully aside.  
  
  
They looked at each other, then their find, then at each other again. They were both so quiet he could hear the wind moving the leaves of the ash tree outside, the shuffle of Ariadne's feet against the carpet and the steady whirr of the copier running down the hall. He wasn't sure if he should laugh, cheer or kiss someone. Ariadne's eyes met his and for a second he saw someone just as stunned and surprised as him: her face a frozen marble carving about to be blessed with Aphrodite's flesh giving touch; wide eyed and lipped in her naked, unguarded wonder as she gazed at him, which meant he really only had one sure course of action.  
  
  
"I don't know about you," he said quietly, watching her anxious swipe of her tongue over her lips, "But I think I need some more coffee."  
  


* * *

  
Dear Dominick,  
  
You asked me today why I think we can dream inside a dream and I could not answer you properly, except to say that when I heard Robert and William talk about their experiences it seemed that they sensed they were only touching the surface of themselves or their unconscious capacity. Will in particular — he gets excited and says he feels like Alice putting her palm on the mirror, feeling it start to go liquid and cool under his touch, but that he can't find a way to step through. Or maybe he doesn't want to; I see fear in his eyes sometimes and wonder what he thinks lies beyond the glass. Only human beings have the capacity to be so aware of ourselves that we can speak of our depths and intricacies, catch glimpses of our shadow selves from the corners of our eyes- what would we do if we met them? How would we know ourselves in our darkling twin?  
  
I think we can find a way beyond, if only because we can manifest so much inside a lucid dream. If Somnacin can be used to trigger the high activity of the emotions and memory areas while suppressing the more logical and process focused parts of the brain, then if we can find a method of exerting a conscious control over what and how it shows us, rather than allowing it manifest things as it desires, I truly believe that it can show us how to reach deeper and older facets of ourselves. Will and Robert have both mentioned that what they find in their dreams is familiar or well known to them: family, friends, the humdrum scenarios that they have replayed in the days or weeks before they went under. While the structure that you give them provides some element of control, meaning that their dream is contained and tolerable for them, it might also be hiding their deeper selves behind more current concerns.  
  
I very much enjoyed the walk we took and the way you listened to me when you asked for my thoughts and opinions. I know I spoke uninterrupted for ten or twenty minutes, but I feel as if I have been holding these thoughts to myself for too long. I can see so much and so far — and I think you can too. I think you out of everyone might be able to see beyond the mirror with me.  
  
Mallorie  
  


* * *

  
_Dear Mal,  
  
Have you ever wondered about why we are as we are? Why humans out of all animals have the ability to say "I am I"? What is that given to us for, that reflexive consciousness that draws the boundary between self and other when we could be like babies, forever thinking that out mothers and fathers were simply extensions of ourselves and that we alone were the centre of the universe? I dream in lines and curves, brick and steel, flesh and iron; that I can make anything I wish rise and fall around me at a mere thought. All that I am I could be, but only when my mind is truly free of the chains of conscious control. How can we go to that place? I know it exists. It has to.  
  
After we talked I was thinking over the first experiments using Somnacin. I don't know if your father ever discussed them with you or let you see the documents about them; I think perhaps not as they are sometimes harsh reading and your father protects you from so much.  
  
I will précis for you: Before we truly understood what a dose of Somnacin could do there were experiments on single and paired subjects, most of whom reported the lucid state that we now all know. But there were others, a handful of whom mentioned that they seemed to wake in a blank, dry landscape or something like a remote seashore (“like a beach at the end of the world”), nothing like the buildings or forests the majority would find themselves in. In their dreams these few found they could create or manifest simply by willing it, making something come of nothing. They mentioned time passing differently too, Mal. One of them said it was as if he could have lived a hundred lives there, but when he woke he could only recall a fraction of what he had been.  
  
The rest went into a state like a coma, except that their bodies would exhibit periods of violent movement followed by long phases of rapid eye movement. They never woke, so it was assumed that they reacted badly to the drug, but could it be possible that they went to that place too? Did something about them make them more able to break through? They moved and slept like dreamers in the waking world, dying eventually when they could no longer be nourished or having contracted secondary infections — but they dreamed, all the time. They never stopped dreaming. What did they dream of? Where did they go?  
  
Can you come to Berkeley with me for coffee again soon? Ideas come faster when you hear them; they make more sense when you take them apart and lay them out in front of you piece by piece than they do inside my mind. You have a gift for untangling me from my own thoughts in a way no one else has, not even Miles.  
  
Dominick  
_

* * *

  
Dear Dom,  
  
Thank you for bringing me the early work you discussed before. I was intrigued and fascinated to see how we fumbled our way through the early days of controlled and shared dreams, using Somnacin as a sedative before the potential to use it as we now do became clear, even more so to read about those who talked of the barren landscape you mentioned and we discussed. I have so many ideas about why they saw what they did — I need to see if I can find any more of the experimental records to test my theories on, to see if I can find a common ground between them. I don't want this to be an anomaly, much as you don't, but I need to be sure we aren't simply chasing a pretty idea with no basis. Can you talk to Yusuf, perhaps see if he has any thoughts to share? Or better, any of the original experimental data?  
  
I was interested to hear you talk about the Labyrinth yesterday, saying that in ancient times it was a wonder and a marvel, treated as a holy thing, a way to free the mind to bring it closer to God. I recalled the one we have both seen at Chartres; for me walking it by candlelight, trying to stay inside the lines as I stepped cautiously along the path. My life has been this, Dominick, and I'm not sure that even you, who knows me best of all, can understand what it has been like to step cautiously from one thing to another, for fear of what might be said or thought of me if I let the facade drop even for a second. The borders of my maze have been strong, thick and well kept; sometimes by others but now mostly by me. I am afraid sometimes still, of what I might be if I let go of this control, this protection around myself and my supposedly delicate mind, and be who I want to be. What would that be like, a life without limits? A life of pure freedom? Letting you in has weakened the walls, and now I wonder more about the what ifs and could bes. I want to redraw the lines, for you and me.  
  
Mallorie  
  


* * *

  
_Dear Mal,  
  
I hope you've had a chance to read the papers Yusuf gave me. He mentioned there might be more data in some of the reports that your father has, particularly around the delta test group (his exact words, if you have the chance to look). They apparently were the ones who showed the most aberrant results and resulted in the highest loss of life of all the subjects. He mentioned to me that they were using an early type of Somnacin in a very high dose, and also that they were the first to use the two way valved cannula design to deliver it.  
  
I dreamed of you in the maze last night, holding a torch high over your head like a pillar of flame, burning the shadows away as you stood before me, offering me a ball of bright red twine. I took the end and tied it around my wrist, then you lowered your hand and showed me you had an identical loop around yours. You were tall and bright as Athena in front of me, you made me feel so fragile and yet so safe with you. My mind sees you this way; it does not see a delicate minded, fragile simpleton. If the walls crumble then we will be strength for each other. We will rebuild the world we find ourselves in and we will make it our own. I knew that in my dream and I know it now.  
  
Dom  
_

* * *

  
Dear Dom,  
  
I'm sorry I ran away from you this evening. It was not you I was afraid of, it was myself. Please give me a few days to think about what you said and what we did. I cannot stop remembering, and wondering — but I need a clear head.  
  
Please, be patient with me.  
  
Mallorie  
  


* * *

  
_Dearest Mal,  
  
I am the one who should apologise. I noticed you weren't with Miles yesterday or today; he said you were unwell but I can't bear to think that you are staying away because of me. I didn't mean to startle or frighten you. I only touched you because some part of me cannot resist all that you are. Your intellect, your vision and your ideas as well as your beauty and passion. I felt your mouth against mine, your hands in my grasp and I understood how one second can be an eternity, one mind and one heart might be born of two meeting. I was overwhelmed and I gave in to the man rather than remaining the colleague.  
  
Please forgive me. I should not have stolen that kiss or scared you away with my suggestion. I didn't mean any harm and I will never touch you again without your permission. I give you my word.  
  
D  
_

* * *

  
Dominick,  
  
Thank you for your note and for the flowers and the book you sent via my father as a get well gift. It was kind and I am very touched.  
  
I want you to know that you didn't scare me that night when we were talking in the office. If anything, you did just what I had hoped you might and had been hoping you might, but when you did...it was as if a wave was coming over me, a rushing fall of water that might have swept me away and I was afraid. I wanted to be so close to you it made me want to crawl out of my skin and into yours. I felt I was out of control and I had to go, or else I had no way of knowing what I would do. I couldn't risk you losing what you have here, your relationship with my father and your job. I couldn't bear the thought that I might lose you when it seems I am only just discovering you. So I stopped myself and made myself go, but I dreamt of you all that night and every one since.  
  
I am coming back to work tomorrow. Please, let me come to you when I am ready. I am still in two minds; one desiring everything and one restraining me from doing something stupid.  
  
Yours,  
  
Mallorie  
  


* * *

  
_Mal,  
  
I saw the annotations you made in my notes around Yusuf's idea. Please come and talk to me. I miss you, even if that's hard for you to hear I have to say it. You know my mind and I know yours. Come into town at 10am and meet me at the usual place.  
  
Dominick_   
  


* * *

  
Dear Dominick  
  
I have checked my father's diary, and the best date would be this coming Saturday, after 6pm. That should allow us five clear hours to do as we want. If you can obtain the supplies from Yusuf then I can get the keys to the test suite, which should be more than adequate for our needs.  
  
I will be truthful — I am excited to experience a shared dream for the first time and to know you will be seeing it with me makes my fingers curl with pleasure. I have seen your designs flattened on paper, the lines of buildings rendered with all your skill and talent but still devoid of their substance. To know that soon I will see them as you did when they came to you, their shape and scale real as the every day — my heart beats faster, my mind races and I see into some other place, a glimpse of a world made by us both.  
  
I've finished reading the reports Yusuf suggested and made some more notes in our book. I saw you had drawn a new maze design — tell me one day why we use the maze, will you? I have always accepted that we do, the dreamer's mind needing structure and space to operate in. But there must be a reason why that, not anything else.  
  
I have been dreaming of your smile. Such a simple dream to bring so much happiness.  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
I have tried so hard to start this note and failed so many times. All the crumpled rejects fill my trash as I tried to make these clumsy words do their inadequate best until we can be alone to talk again. My mind is filled with the sound of your voice, the look in your eyes, the curve of your hands and your mouth as you reached out and touched the fabric of the dream for the first time. The ease of your first steps, taken with your hand on my arm like a child learning to walk, then your faltering, curious movements as you let go, your feet so light you barely seemed to touch the asphalt of my road or the brick of my walls and — oh Mal, do you know how long it took me to learn how to do what you did as simply as if you were breathing? How you spoke of cascade reactions, of the dreamer versus the subject then with a little lift of your lips, you made a tree rise from the split ground, a tiny Yggdrasil, coloured in all four of its seasons? I saw you in your element and the beauty of it was like a hammer blow striking my heart, then and every time since.  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
Thank you so much. I don't know what to say except thank you, over and over. My head is so full I can barely think for all the ideas clamouring for my attention. I have made notes, reams of them, I stole our book away to my room last night and worked like a demon. So many things are so clear now. I see what Will and Robert mean, I can put their words into a framework that we can both understand, not needing you to translate back and forth as if I were deaf and dumb. I can see it so clearly that I can almost touch it, even now, sitting here at my bureau holding my pen, when I blink for a second I am back there and I can feel it around me, I know it and understand it but — there is so much there! Do you know that? I always thought it and now I know as surely as I know I breathe. We're standing on the surface while it lies beneath us, quietly waiting. I felt the recesses of my self opening to this new place and they called to me, Dom. I was with myself and all I knew was around me.  
  
I'm not clear today. My mind is too busy. I will see you when you come back from Fort Worth next week. Please write me. Be the hand at my side.  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
You asked me once why we use the maze. I'm lying in the cot I've been assigned, looking at the cracks in the ceiling and seeing the shape grow from within their crazed form, hearing your voice asking me as it did so long ago, back when we first talked alone, then again in your letters. I know your mind is running hard, dear heart, that you are trying to run along with it — we all do when we first see the dream for ourselves. Something in us feels as if it is free. We need time to recover and absorb it. So let me tell you a story and soothe us both into sleep.  
  
Why the maze?  
  
Once upon a time (all stories begin like this, don't they? Although it wasn't so long ago, as you'll see). Your father was asked to provide some designs for a town. A normal, typical American town with streets, houses, schools and stores. "What for?" He said to General Cobol (your father has gifted you with his curious nature, his stubborn questions and dug in heels. No one will pull the wool over your eyes, will they?) The General tried to put him off, but he refused to give in. "If you want my help," he said, "you'll tell me why. I can't give you my best if I don't know what it’s for." He had been expecting General Cobol to talk of a weapons test or combat training area, so when the man sat down and said, "What do you know about dreams?" Your father was speechless for a moment. A dream was a fleeting and private thing, he said as much, then listened in silent wonder as General Cobol told him about a new chemical they'd discovered and a new way of delivering it; finally saying the words that changed your father's life: "We can share dreams."  
  
Your father went away, confused and questioning what he'd heard. How could it be possible to be inside someone else's head? To make them think or see what you wanted, even to the point of making them see something he'd created? He sat awake all that night, watching you and your mother sleep, seeing you talk and move, wondering over and over what this could be, what it could mean. He fell asleep at your bedside, and then in the morning he called General Cobol and said he would do as he asked, provided he could be there to recreate the plans himself. The general hesitated, but eventually agreed.  
  
When he talks about the first time inside the dream he made, your father struggles to find words. He says he never knew how much power he had in his mind until then, then he stops. It was only a year ago that he told me that when he began to try and refine the details of his town, rearrange things with only a thought (can you imagine?) the people that populated the dream formed a mob, turned on him and tore him apart with their bare hands. He felt every second of their anger, pouring over him as he tried to get away. He woke in agony, that time and every time after that he tried. But he would always return no matter what; he would lie awake in his bed at night and see that place and know he had to go back in spite of the pain and the rage. What he could imagine there was real and that was more addictive to him than any drug.  
  
He tells me he got the idea from a storybook you were reading together. He smiles when he says it, and takes the book down from the shelf: Greek Myths for Girls and Boys. It falls open to the page and there is a picture of Theseus, sword in hand, as he takes the thread from Ariadne. Behind them the labyrinth curls in its endless loops, hiding its danger better than any safe. "I thought what if I put myself in the heart of a maze? What better way to keep them from us than to take the straight line and wrap it around us, over and over, making it longer and more difficult to walk? Since no matter what we tried, we always dreamed people into our landscapes and we had to find a way to occupy them for long enough that they wouldn't turn on us as they always did when we began to experiment. Putting ourselves in the centre of a puzzle would give us time, I thought. No mind can resist a puzzle. It wants to undo it, it wants clear answers and definite conclusions, a win or a lose and nothing in between. If it was between the dream personae and us, I decided they would try to solve it. It might even calm them and make them more agreeable to what we were doing."  
  
He suggested the idea to General Cobol, who at first refused to hear him, arguing they could continue to fight them off with weapons and tactics, until your father convinced him that the maze was the best defence- one of confusion and subterfuge. He went into the dream and showed them, creating a mountain at the heart of the maze and then they could see them, the little figures scurrying through the twists and turns like mice while they sat above and watched them calling, shouting and running towards them, only to be caught in another loop or dead end. After that General Cobol had him redraw his first town plan, this time putting it into a labyrinth. Your father went one better- he made it part of the labyrinth. Even he couldn't resist a puzzle, it seems.  
  
They are such beautiful shapes, those mazes we make. They open like flowers or split into cells like honeycomb, they spiral like nautilus shells or branch like trees. They almost grow from us, Mal. We make them, circling in deeper and deeper as they open in our minds. We draw them, make them for the subject and watch as they step out into them, eager to explore. That's how I know, Mal. I know because the maze seems to want to carry on, long after I stop making it. It has something more to show me and I want to see it, with you.  
  
Sleep well and sweet dreams,  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dear one,  
  
I have been over and over the work that we did and I think I may have a better idea of how we might achieve our aim. It has very little to do with the size of the Somnacin dose, rather the nature and depth of the sleep we might be able to induce. I have managed to secure a small quantity of the standard sedative used by Will and Robert- if we supplement it in a careful and methodical fashion we should find the perfect combination to create the circumstances that we’re looking for. I noticed in the dream that I could make small changes but that you held the structure in place and governed the overall form — why can the subject not change the fabric of the dream? Do we know? Could I seize it from you or have you pass it to me, or does something about you mean that you will always have it if we dream together? I understand the theory of the two way cannula and that the dreamer always descends a fraction before the subjects to create the dream, but if the subject was to know the layout too, could they take over? A coup de rêve?  
  
I miss you a great deal and I think of you every day. Will has been cheering me up by telling me how you’re eating enough peaches to make you one by now (he thinks I miss you agitating papa) and bringing me iced bottles of coca cola from the grocery store as treats. We sit on the porch and he smokes and tells me stories about London, the rationing and the whale meat fritters he ate before he “got in it up to [his] neck” and got sent out here. He’s kind and always trying to make me laugh — a smile is the finest ornament a woman can have, he says.  
  
Come home soon (and bring me some peaches),  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
We have had a lot of peach pie at the mess here, but I am pleased to say it’s delicious. Not as sweet as your kisses though, nothing will ever be as fine as them; even if I had a thousand I would never get sick of them. See, I am turning into a complete fool all at your incitement. I’ll be reciting poetry under your window soon, asking if that is the east and you are the sun.  
  
Training has gone well, and I suppose it’s a good opportunity for me to try and explain to you how we think the dynamic between the dreamer and the subject works, because the truth is we’re not absolutely sure why it does. For instance, when I dream with Robert either of us can be the dreamer (in fact Robert is meant to be, since my role is to teach him and see if he can reproduce my design.) In theory since he takes the lead and is given the Somnacin dose first he is the one who normally takes that part. But there have been instances where I have taken the role from him, despite being given the second dose- they’re never intentional, but it seems that my own familiarity with the environment and the way in which it should work means that somehow I override him and form the dream without his input. Your father and Doctor Kabir have hypothesised that there are certain psyche traits which lend themselves to this scenario better than others, and that it may be that if two similar minds at a similar level of skill dream together there may be a struggle between them, with the authority to mould the dream switching back and forth. (This is the reason I have never dreamt with Will Eames, since his ability to manipulate would easily conflict with mine, quite possibly leading to a dream collapsing with us inside it.)  
  
As such, we use a process where the dreamer is designated and the subjects suppress any ability out of choice . When we begin training someone this is an easy matter- most subjects don’t realise what they can do until they’re taught, so they exert no influence over the dream and are the perfect, passive subject. As they learn how to create a dream and how to exist in one that brings them into conflict with the dreamer. With the officers I taught this last few weeks this was never going to be a problem: even if they could get to the point where they might be able to change something big like the town or the maze design, they would have to take the dreamer’s role from me, and none of them have that degree of skill. I taught them suppression techniques in any case, because they’ll have to dream with each other and then they’ll need to be considerate of it. So we think it’s a case of consent on the subject’s part and focus on the dreamer’s, and so far we’ve never had reason to believe otherwise.  
  
I will be back in four days. Do you want to come out to Berkeley? I thought we could go a little further, maybe to the coast for a picnic and a swim in the sea? I’ve missed the ocean while I’ve been here, almost as much as I’ve missed you.  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
My dear one,  
  
You’re home tomorrow I know, but I am writing anyway so that you will have something to find when you get back. I am glad you’re here and I hope you’ve remembered to bring me a peach. I will accept a kiss as a substitute, but only in extremis!  
  
I hope you will not be angry when I share a secret that I’ve been keeping from you; I hope you will see that I did not do it to try and leave you behind or to outstrip you, rather so that we could continue our experiments from a new point — but I’m getting ahead of myself. While you’ve been at Fort Benning I’ve been working on some of the Somnacin mixtures I mentioned before. I was sure that after reading all the research and examining the current blend I could fine tune the sedatives to create a different effect. I did some work, ran some analysis and I reached the point where I felt I had found a near perfect blend. So I performed a test with myself as the subject. I know you asked me to wait, but I made sure that everything I did was as safe as I could make it. I performed the test overnight while my parents were sleeping, so no one knew I was using the PASIV; I took my alarm clock to help time my dream and to act as my signal; I left a note for Will so someone would know if things went wrong so I was as safe as if I was with you.  
  
It was incredible, Dom. I think I may have found the way we’ve been looking for. I’ve kept notes of everything, all my lab work, all of the dream, everything. It was beautiful and so clear...I was walking through a formal garden, seeing it become wilder as I went, each step seeming to make the trees more lush and the flowers blossom. I wasn’t trying to make the dream happen like you’ve told me you usually do, I simply walked through it as if I was making and creating it in perfect synchronisation. There were birds in the trees and animals prowling through the bushes, fountains and a running stream chattering over the pebbles in its bed until finally I reached what I knew was the centre and I saw it lying on the ground in front of me. The key is so simple, dear love, that you will not believe when I tell you! We can dream within a dream by the means with which we enter any dream — that sounds like nonsense! But it’s true. I can’t wait to show you. Come and see me tomorrow and we shall make plans!  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
I’m sorry I had to leave in such a hurry yesterday evening and that I will be away today. But I have to say properly: you were right, sweetheart, you were right and however angry I was with you for taking so many risks I can’t blame you for doing what you did. We stop trying to force, let the mind go and it lets us see what we need to see. You are incredible, Mallorie Miles, and I love you.  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
I have checked my father’s diary and I’ve found some more dates when we might be able to run some more tests. I’ve recorded everything in the book for us and refined the blend a little more. This time I think we should try to use the device we find, see if it can do as we think it might. I can’t sleep for thinking of things that we might do or try.  
  
All my love,  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
The day at the beach was wonderful and your bathing suit was extremely cute. No one should be allowed to be as cute as you are without carrying a Surgeon General’s warning. I don’t mean to tease you, but you are and always have been so beautiful to me, but now I know you and can see all of you — it is as if I can see you with new eyes, dear love. Every new facet of you is a discovery and you are my America. A very cute, very lovely America with a mind that would make idiots of many lesser men and bakes incredible brownies.  
  
Your stupidly infatuated,  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
My father and mother will be away for a week over her birthday (May 3rd.) I think that would be the perfect time for us to do something more in depth, if you are happy to? Meet me in town this evening and we can talk it over while I enjoy looking at your handsome face, kiss your cheeks, your lips and your eyelids; tell you about how you’ve let me make my life into that of an adventurer, not leaving me as the damned Lady of damned Shallot shut in her blasted tower all over again.  
  
Kisses,  
  
Your Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
I don’t regret it and I never will, dear love. I hope you can see that. I wish to God we were not being separated so soon, that we could lock ourselves away from the world and I can tell you again and again how much I feel for you, want to care for you and keep you only to myself and in my heart — but we have to try and live. Every time I look at you I feel you in my arms, I hear your voice and I see us there, on that beach at the end of the world and know that what we are is somehow beyond what anyone has ever known before or will since. Don’t be alarmed or think that I am going to cast you to one side now we’ve done what we wanted to. I am with you Mal, even if I am not at your side.  
  
Your loving  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
Sweetheart, my dearest one, I am not regretful for anything that we did either. I think of it so often that I am distant with my parents and Will, leaving them asking me why I am daydreaming, then I blush and the colour of our secret comes to my cheeks. What would they say if they knew what we did? What we saw and who we were? I was your wife and you were my husband in all ways. We lived as such, raised a world from dust and filled it with life — yet we aged mere minutes. How can we have been expected to go on but as we did? Desire meeting desire, will meeting will, mind meeting mind until there was just one where two had been — but I am not a poet, not like you, and never have been. Write to me while you are at Fort Benning. Dream of me and tell me in your dreams how you love and miss me. I will tell you the same.  
  
Mal xx  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
I miss you. Today in training I saw you walking the city with us, and some of my trainees whistled and hollered after you. I wanted to break their faces with my fists. Instead I left them behind and ran after you, the dream you in your sundress with the red roses. I heard the waves, smelt the salt as I caught your hand, made you turn to me and I covered your face with kisses. You laughed and said: “You know how to find me, dear love. You know what you have to do.”  
  
“Come home,” I replied, and you nodded.  
  
I want to come home, Mal. I want to be where you are.  
  
D  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
I have some news that I have to tell you as soon as you get this note. It is very, very important that you call. I will wait by the telephone between 4pm and 6pm so that if you call then I will answer. I have to speak with you so please, don’t delay.  
  
I love you.  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
I know you don’t want me to say this but please, do nothing until I get back. I heard everything that you said and really don’t want you to do anything without me to support you. We got into this together and I am as much to blame as you are. I love you and I won’t let you face anyone, not your parents, not General Cobol or Mr. Saito and Mr. Fischer without me to take my share of the blame. I am going to be here for you through everything, I promise.  
  
Your loving,  
  
D  
  
_

* * *

  
Dom,  
  
I hope this reaches you before you leave Georgia, but I’m writing it as fast as I can so I can catch the mailman. I told papa everything today, what we did, how and why; that I am not going to let him send you away under the guise of protecting me since I am leaving home and nothing he can do will stop me. I am tired of the constant protests that I am too fragile and need them to defend me. I’m not a fool, a child or weak headed. I consented fully, you didn’t tempt me away or force me to go with you. I’m never going to escape unless I do it now, while I have the nerve. I’m leaving tomorrow, so I will try and call with a message for you. I will tell you where I’m headed then, my mind is in a jumble from the things papa and I said to each other. I just want you to know that I’m not afraid and I don’t feel guilty. We did the right things, no matter who might say otherwise.  
  
I love you.  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

  
_M,  
  
Happy Birthday, dear love. This morning I woke up to find you next to me and I was so happy that I cannot begin to find the words for it. My beautiful Mallorie, sleeping in my bed, accepting my kisses through a drowsy mumble. Come and be with me, I said to you, watching you blink and smile. You said you had seen our future again, and it had made you wish it were already here. I am happy with the present because it has you.  
  
D_   
  


* * *

  
Dom,  
  
Happy Thanksgiving from your America xxx  
  
Thank you for coming into my life and making it such a bright, free place. I know (I’ve seen!) that we have a wonderful future waiting.  
  
Your deliriously happy, ever loving,  
  
Mal  
  


* * *

_  
Mal,  
  
I am sorry that these days are hard for you. I want to tell you that I can’t bear going out of the apartment and leaving you alone any more than you can bear to have me go, but please try and see that this, this place and time with me is what matters. You need to be well and happy here, not pinning everything on a dream. It wasn’t a prediction, Mal, no matter what happened since, and we cannot force this world to be like it. Please, listen to me. I’m speaking out of love and concern, not the desire to shut you in and keep you cloistered like your father. We can survive this. We’ve made it so far because we love and trust each other. Don’t let that go. Carry me in your heart like I carry you in mine.  
  
Always yours,  
  
Dom_  
  


* * *

  
Dom,  
  
I’m scared. I think that somehow I willed this into life. All my wishing and my scheming has brought us to this. I can see the edges of our life fraying and I don’t know what I made from what simply is. I’m sorry, I am so very, very sorry, my dear heart.  
  
Mallorie  
  


* * *

  
_Mal,  
  
I will never make you a promise that I cannot keep; you know that. I promise you that this life is the one I want, this is as true to me as anything I‘ve ever felt. I know it’s real because every sense I have, every fibre of me knows that it is. I can’t prove it to you any other way except to love you, all of you, to be the man I am, not the shadow you see in me. I am Dominick Cobb, you are Mallorie Miles and this is our life. I want to do nothing but be with you. Believe me, Mallorie, I promise on everything dear to me- this is real. I am real. Stay with me, my love, promise me that you will read this and see.  
  
I love you.  
  
Dom  
_

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For warnings and disclaimers - see chapter one

~*~

 

The spring wind pulled at Arthur's coat and scarf as he walked down Amsterdam Avenue, forcing him to bury his hands in his pockets and burrow his face further into his collar as he strode past the dirty brown brick and grey washed stone of the buildings around him. The sky was lowering in a thick cover of smudgy cloud, swirls of dirty white and pale blue grey scudding around the rooftops as Manhattan thrust up to meet it in defiance; man's middle finger raised at nature in a sneering, steel framed and glass plated salute. He hurried past the Cathedral, with its huge, blind, dark rose window staring out at the city beyond; shivering as a blast of cold wind tumbled down the broad steps and wrapped around his legs, nipped at his ears and ruffled his hair. It rattled the spare leaved branches of the people's garden as he tried to shake it off, letting it buffet and rush him until he slipped down Cathedral Parkway, eluding it and letting it chase down the pavements towards 109th Street without him.

 

Ariadne had called him that morning, her manner as brisk as the snap in the air. "I've been thinking. We need to meet and discuss what we should do next."

"We?"

"We made this discovery together, you and I. We can't let it — " she drew in an impatient breath that filled the line with a wave of noise " — we need to find out what happened."

"If they found anything, you mean?" Arthur traced a circle over the cover of the red fairy tale book, letting it curl in to itself as he went. "You have some ideas on how to proceed?" he added quietly, lowering his voice as if he might be overheard.

"Can we meet this afternoon? There's a cafe called Amrita near where I'm staying. The map says Central Park West. Do you know it?"

"I can find it," he tucked the phone under his chin as he scrawled a hurried note. "I'll bring everything with me."

 

She rang off just as Nash tapped at Arthur's door, elbowing it open to reveal their morning coffee in his hands and a bright smile on his face. "Here he is! The holder of the Stephen Miles' collection." He raised one mug in a salute and grinned broadly. Arthur let himself smile back but didn't miss Nash's keen glance around the amassed papers as he crossed the room. "So, have you found anything yet? Stephen's dirty laundry buried under —" Nash peered at a bound report atop one pile, "— uniform design integration in PASIV dream structures," he read slowly. "Exciting."

"No," Arthur met his look head on and made a face he hoped looked slightly tired. "Just a lot of technical data so far. Interesting in terms of looking at how it evolved, but nothing spectacular." He wrapped his hands around his cup and waited for Nash to return volley, as he surely would.

"Ariadne couldn't help?" The casual air was ever so slightly too much, Nash's pose too lazy and his smile too wide as he looked at Arthur, making a sparkle of anxiety start in the pit of his stomach.

"No. Well, except around some of the handwriting identification. Cobb's annotations appear on some of the plans." Arthur forced himself to sip as Nash raised an eyebrow.

"So, what did you think of her?"

"She was very thorough," Arthur replied briskly.

"That isn't what I meant." Nash smirked. "She's a delight, isn't she? So sweet to look at, you'd never know she could cut you into ribbons with that brain of hers." Arthur felt himself recoil inwardly at the image.

"I'm sure that to the right person she's very attractive," he levelled at Nash as if he were a slightly dim and reluctant student, "But our relationship is purely academic."

"Are you seeing her again?" Nash's smirk widened to a grin and the warning sparkle blossomed into a full blown freeze. Why would Nash be asking that unless he thought there was something interesting in Miles' papers that would need her expertise? Would he actually attempt to poach the research out from under Arthur's nose as brazenly as that? Or was he simply fishing to see if Ariadne Portier was single and free for him to smear with his sticky fingers, still warm from his latest graduate student or administrative office conquest?

"No," Arthur lied calmly, staring Nash down.

His eyes tightened then flickered away, staring into his drink. "Shame." He took a slow sip of his coffee. "It would have been nice to work with her again."

Arthur jammed his knee against his locked desk drawer and smiled back as genuinely as he could. "Maybe another time. For both of us."

 

He had spent the remainder of his morning methodically scanning the letters and making two back ups, one to his remote storage and one to disk. He reread fragments as the scanner purred and thumped, a seam of white light glowing from under its closed lid as it beamed the papers with its glare, keeping one ear open for any steps coming near the copy room. He then carefully packed everything away, tucking his laptop and the wrapped letters into his battered leather messenger bag, buttoning his coat and winding his scarf snugly to his neck.

As he left he checked the lock on his door. He'd never done so before, but something compelled him to stop in the hall, twisting the handle back and forth as he pushed against it, feeling it move a fraction then hold. It would do for now. He glanced up and down the empty corridor twice, then set off, pulling his collar up as he went.

 

Ariadne was sitting at a table tucked in an alcove that had been dressed with scarlet drapes. She was looking down at a large notebook, her face obscured by the layers of her hair as Arthur approached her, his steps sharp on the polished wooden floor. One hand held a tall, white mug, her pen woven in the fingers of the other, tapping the surface as she read. She looked up as he approached, her face clearing from tight concentration to recognition as her mouth and brow relaxed. "Doctor Moss," she said, her voice catching softly on the sibilant as she rose to greet him, "Thank you for coming." She quickly gathered up her outdoor coat, which was slung in a heap on the seat opposite her, clearing a space for him to sit, hurriedly whisking away with it a hat and woollen scarf, their grey and dun hues a beautiful neutral like a sparrow's wing.

"It was no trouble." He felt awkward as he took her offered hand, not sure if he should assume their easy working intimacy was still a given. "Thank you for calling me." She nodded and sat, which he took as his cue to shed his outer layers and disgorge the contents of his bag onto the table, fidgeting with his computer, the folder and his coffee before he took his seat.

"You're neat," Ariadne observed, making him look up abruptly. "Almost fastidious at times. I noticed in your office too." Arthur felt her examining look pinning him again.

"I like clarity. It makes following lines of enquiry easier when you can map them all. Although maybe it's a by product of living alone. I'm developing quirks in my dotage." He let his smile creep around the self-depreciating words, watching as her expression stuttered slightly, finally choosing to relax again as she glanced hurriedly back to her notebook.

 

"I've been examining some possible approaches to following the letters, thinking of the sources I have at my disposal as well as the ones we have here." She turned her longhand notes towards him so he could see, both of them leaning over the table as she talked. She smelt of something citrus, Arthur noted idly, a high, pure, almost acid bright note, lying over something green and nearly darkly floral, unlike any scent he'd experienced before. "I have Cobb's collected notebooks in Paris. He gifted them to the archive before he was presumed to have died in the late sixties. We can make handwriting comparisons; see if any of them might be the notebook Mallorie mentions."

"Do any of them mention experiments in dreaming?" Arthur interrupted.

"It’s possible. Some of them can be quite oblique and the references aren't always clear. They can shift from being part diary, with observations and notes to being more of an ideas scrapbook. He talks about the maze quite frequently. He notes his conversations with Stephen. He draws, as you would expect him to, and he makes various hypothetical statements about the possibilities of using shared dreams. He quotes 1 Corinthians 13:12 more than once — ‘For now we see through a glass darkly’," she clarified as Arthur smiled back wryly.

"I'm familiar with it, but thank you."

"There are notes apparently made in another hand in two of the twelve, marginalia really and mostly ignored. But thinking about it." She opened the letters and drew out one of Mallorie's. "The hand might be hers. I would need to check. Then we can gather what she might have added to his work."

"Will that yield much?"

"As a primary source? It'll help verify the letters, but it’s impossible to say much more without checking. I wouldn't like to risk guessing either," she added hurriedly.

"But if you had to?" Arthur watched her eyes dart over his face.

"My instinct is that she made a more substantial contribution than previously thought. But it has to be verified," she insisted, "I have contacts at the military archive who hold some of Cobb's earlier work, although for the most part I've made a thorough examination of it all and its unlikely to be more than another verification. We might be able to talk to Ito Saito and see if there's anything in their family records." She stopped and tapped the page as if reluctant to continue.

 

"What about William Eames and Yusuf Kabir? Might they know anything?" Arthur suggested. "Mal mentions she was close to William in the letters, could she have confided in him? Or perhaps mentioned something in passing? Cobb spoke to Yusuf about the research too. I think that they might be able to help." He met her look head on. "They're a primary source and two out of the four original team members still living. You've already interviewed them, so we can use that as a way in." Ariadne worked her lower lip between her teeth for a second.

"They could be useful," she started slowly.

"We could use the letters to show them what we know, use it as leverage so they don't feel they're revealing anything that might have been secret until now." Arthur felt his eagerness starting to run ahead of him. "We might even be able to have them create a reconstruction for us." Her eyes widened sharply as he carried on, "It can't hurt to ask them, Ariadne."

 

Her lips were parted as she blinked at him, her face carrying that same trace of surprise he'd seen only two days ago, her eyes suddenly bright and her complexion vivid, making the world around her fade into mere background. "With the PASIV?" she asked.

"I can borrow one of the department's then I can use it with them, record the sessions if they consent to them and add them to our research."

 

She hesitated, her excitement damped down as she replied slowly. "I can't take Cobb's notebooks from the archive in Paris."

"That's fine. I can give you copies of the letters if you need them. You could verify them, then contact Eames and Yusuf and arrange for me to dream with them —"

"— they both live in France."

 

Arthur stopped sharply. She was back under tight control, the fierce focus and concentration reminding him of a painfully young opponent he'd faced in a fencing match some years ago, as if she was preparing her stance and readying for the parry. He recalled her earlier reference to how they should proceed: now was not the time to blunder or swipe at her with a clumsy attack. He balanced himself, then made his advance.

 

"I think we should continue this as we started it, as a joint project. If you're OK with that." A slight relaxation as she inclined her head. Arthur took her invitation and carried on. "We could go back to France together when you fly out and continue working there. I'd have to clear it with my department head, but I am owed some vacation time so it should be fairly simple to arrange."

"That would be good," she said evenly. "Can you bring the PASIV across international borders?"

"It's classified as medical equipment. It can travel in the hold with the Somnacin doses. The department has a flight case and I can submit it for customs inspection."

"What about the rest of Stephen Miles' papers? Could someone else perhaps start to write the detailed catalogue?"

"No." Arthur's abrupt word made her frown. "We'll take the most pertinent with us. The rest I'll put into storage until we get back." Very secure storage, he decided, just in case his suspicions proved valid. "When can you contact William Eames and Yusuf Kabir?"

 

* * *

Arthur wanted to be ready for Paris, but he soon realised that no one was ever ready for a place whose image and reputation are bigger than its reality. The city of love, all Eiffel Tower, handholding couples whispering sweet nothings over cafe au lait and croissants, and tall white town houses overlooking the glistening Seine is also the city of harassed French people, gaggles of tourists, bad traffic, a muddy brown river, American chain stores, and overpriced coffee. Spring is just as cold and damp as New York but he found some solace, walking the tiny streets of the Latin Quarter and the 9th Arrondisment he discovered the quieter, dare he say more French side of Paris, ordering cups of black coffee in halting French, watching the locals slip by with their shopping bags, briefcases, and backpacks.

 

Ariadne didn’t join him for the first few days of sightseeing as she made it clear she had to discuss their research with her supervisor, who would doubtless want to speak to his supervisor in New York; then she would obtain Cobb’s notebooks from the archive. She had mentioned this back and forth with a healthy dose of irritation, obviously keen to be working rather than negotiating. They had discussed their research plan on the flight to Charles DeGaulle, muttering in the dark confines of the row of economy class seats where they had by silent agreement left the central one empty.

“Once I’ve got the notebooks we can check the handwriting against his to confirm the letters from him are actually from him. Then we can look at the marginalia to see if either hand matches.”

“Are you going to do the comparison?”

“For now,” she said nodded. “I’m used to looking at space and line so it’s not so far from my expertise as you might imagine. Then I’ll contact Will Eames and see if he’ll agree to speak with us. His house on the Cap d’ Antibes so we can get the overnight train from Paris to Cannes.”

“I should have brought my swim suit.” Arthur saw her brows knot briefly before she caught his less than serious meaning and half smiled.

 

“Where are you staying in Paris?” she asked. “You’ll need to be within easy distance of the school so we can meet promptly in the mornings and I should have an address where I can reach you.”

“I booked with a place near Ivry-sur-Siene.” Arthur tapped at his cell to show her the map. “It was short notice and my budget isn’t great, but the reviews are fine.”

Ariadne took it from him and dismissed it with a glance. “You’re too far away from where we’ll be working.” She paused and looked at him, taking a number of slow, thoughtful breaths as she examined him with her penetrating gaze before she spoke. “I have a spare room in my apartment. It isn’t very big, but it has a bed and it would avoid the need for you to travel far or for us to have any delay in contacting each other.”

“I don’t want to impose on you,” he replied hurriedly. “Or your partner.”

“I live alone at the moment.” She went back to sorting the copies of the letters she had in her lap. “It wouldn’t be a problem for me. I take it you’re not a keen partier or drinker?”

“No, not at all. I even put the toilet seat down and rinse out the basin when I shave,” he added flippantly.

“That’s good to know.” Ariadne sidestepped his attempt at brevity with a smooth feint. “I can cook, but it would be good if we could share that responsibility, unless you like to eat out?”

 

Arthur hurriedly reviewed his culinary repertoire: macaroni and cheese, marinara sauce, risotto, omelettes, baked potatoes, ramen, and salads. “We could do both?” he risked as Ariadne nodded briefly.

 

“There was one other thing,” she said slowly. “I am going to need a chance for you to teach me about PASIV dreaming.”

“You’ve never used the PASIV?” Arthur watched her fidget with the papers as he frowned. How had she done any work on Cobb without it? He boggled.

“No. Since my work was based on the architectural aspect rather than the dream one, I studied Cobb’s designs as plans and models then compared them to the buildings that exist in reality and took my cue from that. It was a perfectly adequate way to approach it and very successful in the long run. It’s hard enough to get access to a PASIV for non medical use as it is and I wasn’t crazy about dreaming with someone I didn’t know just for the sake of seeing something I could create in reality with less risk.”

Arthur interrupted, “The risk level is extremely small.”

“But it does exist,” she insisted. “Dream collapse syndrome, Somnacin poisoning, and sleep disorders do occur.”

“You didn’t want to ask a therapist to supervise you?”

“I didn’t want to just open my mind to anyone,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Even someone trained?”

“I’m asking you.” She looked straight at him with her ferocious eyes. “You can teach me. If we’re going to use the PASIV with Will Eames and Yusuf Kabir then I want to be ready for it.” He let the statement hang for a moment, wondering what might have kept her from going into a shared dream when her work was so firmly grounded in the area. But then, was it so different from studying Ancient Rome or deep space — neither required you go there to have an understanding of their fabric. Was she in fact, on some remote level, offering him her trust?

 

“Sure,” he assented, meeting her head on. “We can start whenever you like.”

 

* * *

Ariadne’s office was wonderful and Arthur coveted it from the moment he stepped through the door. It had a pair of high windows that cast light onto a wide drawing board that was set at a right angle to her desk. On the far wall a neat set of cubby holes held rolled plans and a set of shelves next to it had a variety of buildings modelled in tiny detail while next to the desk was a book case crammed with texts and folded portfolios. On the spare gap of wall by the door Arthur saw one of Francis Bacon’s self portraits had been tacked up and it made him smile to be reminded of his own space.

 

Ariadne herself was at her desk when he entered, having come at her request to join her for the afternoon, but she turned when he came in and smiled politely.

“I’ve got Cobb’s notebooks for us to examine.” She cast around for a chair for him, moving a pile of papers so he could sit and draw up alongside her. “I’ve started looking at his notes against his letters.” She had a hardbound book open in front of her and lying next to it was a copy of one of the letters.

“What are you looking for?”

“Consistency, the shape of his writing and his use of words; if these letters are Dominick Cobb’s then they’ll look like something we know is his. It’s not a completely accurate test but it reduces the margin of doubt.” She frowned as Arthur leant over the page next to her.

“ _In all cases where personae appear it seems that the ability to distract them is linked to the emotional state of the subject. When the subject is upset, so are they and they’re more inclined to attack than if they are present when the subject has been relaxed_.”  

He read quietly, hearing her soft sound of approval. “Fifty-five years and it’s still true,” he added wryly.

 

“I wonder what he was like to dream with,” Ariadne said suddenly, putting her index finger under the word personae and comparing it with Cobb’s letter explaining the maze to Mallorie. “He’s always seemed so emotionally driven to me. Does that come out in dreams?”

“It can,” Arthur said, “But it depends on the mind involved. The better trained the more likely it is to be controlled and able to create a stable dream. We all give the dream something of ourselves, but I was taught it should be a fraction of the whole, not the whole itself. If you do that you overwhelm the subject and that isn’t ideal.”

 

He watched Ariadne make a note on the scan then flip to another section, taking up the letter from Fort Benning. It was a peach you gave me, not an apple, but still we were in Eden, he saw her compare, giving no indication she’d heard him answer her. Was she ignoring him on purpose or was she now just so absorbed he barely registered in her mind? With a horrified suddenness, he saw the scenario he had secretly been dreading. That now they were on her home ground the balance had shifted further from him and she was taking the lead, either under the auspices of her department head, her own stronger position and better reputation, or simply because he was letting her in a kind of unwitting surrender to all the above. What had happened to him?

 

“I can help,” he spoke suddenly, making her jerk up to look at him. “I’m a researcher too, so even if I can’t compare writing I can examine content. I’m familiar with the notebooks and I can assist.” Ariadne looked at him in surprise, as if he was a mute who’d been granted the power of speech. “This is a joint project,” he insisted. “We work together or not at all.”

 

She was quiet for a moment, leaving him wondering if he’d gone too far and she was going to throw him out, then she licked her lips nervously, put out her hand and passed him the next notebook from the small pile by her right hand. “Sorry,” she said quietly. “I forget myself at times.”

“It’s fine,” he admitted, adding, “When you work alone it gets easy to get swallowed up in it. We all get a little territorial I guess, if we’re not used to company.” She pulled her mouth in a straight line and nodded in acknowledgement. When he didn’t speak again she dipped her head back down towards her work.

He opened the book, took up the copy of Cobb’s first letter and began, letting them both relax into the quiet.

 

* * *

Ariadne’s apartment, like her office, was a high windowed sanctuary perched in what Arthur decided must once have been an attic of a private house. The rooms show signs of controlled disorder, spots given over to work and reading dotted around the otherwise neat rooms. Ariadne showed him round with a slightly awkward air, leaving him wondering if she regretted having him in her space, disrupting the peace and personal calm. Her guest room was tiny, barely room for the bed, but it was cheered by a beautiful view over the street and the wide blue sky of Paris. He had put his case down and thanked her politely, offering to buy them their evening meal as compensation. Since then they had lived in the strange familiarity of college dorm mates: Arthur found himself listening to the water rattling in the pipes or waiting for the smells of food and coffee so he wouldn’t stumble on her unexpectedly, the ease with which they were beginning to fit together as researchers somehow not translating so easily into domesticity.

They had been comparing Cobb’s letters and notebooks for a week when Ariadne finally brought the subject of the PASIV back up. They were sitting at her dining table, between them a red enamelled dish from which she’d served a rich chicken and wine casserole. “I thought I might try something different,” she had said briskly. “I hope it tastes OK. Cooking is a more of a survival skill than a hobby for me. Cooking for myself is usually just about fuel.” She poured two glasses of a pale yellow wine as he nodded in agreement and handed him one, “ _Salut_.”

“I’m the same.” He cut into the meat on his plate, enjoying the savoury aroma of the slowly cooked onions, potatoes, leeks and thyme with undisguised pleasure. “This is excellent, by the way.”

“I was thinking that we could start my training in PASIV dreaming after dinner.” Ariadne hardly missed a beat as she changed the subject, leaving him to catch up as he chewed and swallowed. “I’ve researched the usual procedures and risks, so I’m ready to begin.” Arthur watched her sip her wine and take a mouthful of food as calmly as if she’d just been talking about the weather, quite unlike the woman who had discussed her reservations on their flight.

“Sure.” He let the word hang between them, but Ariadne gave nothing away.

“Good.” She arranged another forkful of casserole. “I’m looking forward to it.”

 

* * *

“First.” He took her hand in his and turned it over so her wrist was exposed, the thin skin white and fragile as he looked at it. Ariadne sat on the edge of the couch, the PASIV open by her feet. Arthur uncoiled the lead and squeezed the paired needles free from the end. “I’ll set both our leads then start the PASIV. I’m the dreamer so I go down a little before you. You might be disorientated at first but I’ll be close by and I’ll be in control of the dream environment. No matter what happens remember that, OK?”

Ariadne nodded. Her body tightened as he inserted the needles and fastened her cuff, inhaling with a wince. “I fucking hate needles,” she muttered to herself as he sat back on his heels and took his own line.

“Everyone does,” he replied with a dry smile. She watched him closely as he prepped himself and settled on the floor.

“Any more questions?” he asked as gently as possible, seeing her stiff posture as she tried to relax.

“Just first time nerves,” she dismissed him and pressed herself into the cushions defiantly. Arthur bit back a smile at her battling her own soft furnishings in an attempt to appear comfortable. “Let’s do it.”

The injection piston hissed as he depressed it, counting back from ten under his breath as he felt his awareness of the room dissolve, holding the shape of the dream in his mind as he went: the building, the polished elegance of the lobby, the couch; the maze, the sky, the city outside...

He thought Ariadne gasped just as her living room slipped away, but by the time the sound registered he was fully under and it slipped from his head like a ripple on water.

 

* * *

The dream layout he’d chosen was one of the better known and used designs, a large building that he’d seen used as a hotel, a conference centre, and even a high class brothel (admittedly, the patient was suffering from a rather acute sex addiction). Arthur opened his eyes to find he was dressed exactly as he had been when he was in Ariadne’s apartment in slacks, a button down, and sweater, sitting on an angular leather couch next to her. The space was broad and open, polished marble and wood reflecting the warm golden light from the lamps around them, while outside the vast windows a city of skyscrapers soared to the sky of mottled clouds. Next to him Ariadne moved, making a faint sound as she tested her limbs, then turned around in her seat to take the scene in.

“One One One Ash,” she said eventually. “My god, look at it.“ She breathed and got up, her head craned back as she looked at the ceiling, then exclaiming again as she strode up to the glass and put her palms on it, gazing outside. “We can go out there?” Her breath fogged the glass as she spoke.

“If you like. It’s complete and stable,” he answered as she turned back to him, looking him over as he sat there, watching her and feeling her awe colour his own satisfaction at seeing her adapting so well.

“How — I’ve never known and asking now seems so backwards, but how does it work?”

“Would you be really disappointed if I told you we’re not a hundred percent sure?” He got up and joined her at the window, tucking his hands in his pockets as he watched her examining the city beyond in tiny flickers of eye movement. He couldn’t stop looking at her, seeing her as disarmed and eager as she’d been when they were working, but this time on his account and in his care. He felt a lurch inside and just as he had the first time they’d met, her physical presence impacted on him like a punch. She had been beautiful then of course, but remote at the same time; now she was opening out, the slight touch of her trust and regard warming her in his eyes. _Oh, god_ , he thought, _my god, I —_

 

“What? This is the twenty first century,” she said in disbelief. “How can we still not be sure?”

“It may be the twenty first century, but so far the best there are are hypotheses. They vary from the neurochemistry of sympathetic responses mediated by the two way cannula — which is interesting since they’re designed to connect you to the PASIV so it can control your dosage, not effect anyone else’s — to the idea that low level close range telepathy is induced by the dream state. Before the PASIV was refined all Somnacin did was put people to sleep. It was dosing two people from the same drip at the same time that led us here,” he said as she turned back to the room they were in, then back to him with huge eyes, sparkling with excitement.

“Nothing conclusive?”

“No, not from MRI or EEG data, radioactive isotope tracking or CAT scanning. That’s the problem with the human brain: we don’t know enough to definitely attribute function to structure in the case of things like personality or emotion or even dreaming. It’s a system of barely cooperative parts, not just a simple input/output engine like your liver or your heart. So we can talk about how human beings are visual animals with the ability to recognise themselves when presented with their reflection. That we can say, “I am I and you are you.” That we can conceptualise and abstract states of mind and emotions or place ourselves in time and space relative to others using language and symbols. We can test for chemical reactions and electrical activity and see how proteins form into neurons and neurons connect to each other and so on. But when we look at the whole it’s chaotic, like nailing a swarm of bees to a wall. So the best we can do is to keep asking.” He leant back on the window as she carried on exploring, kneeling to touch the floor with reverent fingers, patting a table and then a supporting pillar.

 

“So how do we know layered dreams are impossible?” she asked eventually. “They experimented, right? On the record, with Robert Fischer, Kintaro Saito, and Stephen Miles.”

“They did, using a high dose of Somnacin with a barbiturate sedative. It just made them sleep for twenty or thirty hours at a time. Robert Fischer eventually got distressed during the attempts, since they seemed to make the dream personae more aggressive when they eventually did manage to dream.”

“Where are they right now?” she asked suddenly and he resisted the urge to tell her Fischer was in Sydney while the other men were in their graves.

“The personae are in the maze, if that’s what you’re asking. This isn’t a therapy session so you don’t need to project anyone.” Arthur saw her closing the distance between them, the colour in her cheeks rosy bright.

“But how would I?” she pressed urgently. “I want to learn,” she added when he hesitated for a second.

 

“It’s easier to begin with a memory of someone you know well,” he began, keeping his voice deliberately calm and level. “Imagine they’re in the room. Close your eyes,” he prompted softly, watching her obey. “You know their face, their stature, how they dress and speak. How they would greet you if they were here.“ Ariadne’s hands made small fists by her sides as she breathed in deeply. “Give them a shape and voice in your mind and then —”

 

“Ari petal?” a man’s voice spoke in sudden surprise from just behind him, making Arthur jump as Ariadne’s eyes opened with a snap.

“Dad?”

Arthur turned slowly and there was a tall man, dark haired and clean shaven, his patrician features warmed with a smile that crinkled the corners of his clear brown eyes. His accent was American, possibly even southern Canadian when he spoke, holding his arms out to her with an expression so loving it made Arthur’s breath catch and he knew he had to intervene.

 

“No,” Arthur said carefully, reaching out to take Ariadne’s arm in a firm grip. “He’s your idea and your memory of your father. You need to keep that in mind. This is not real, no matter how it looks or feels. We’re going to reverse it now. Suppress the memory. Let it fade out.” Ariadne frowned again, her eyes open as she watched her father’s shape smudge and fog. “Now make it quiet. Acknowledge it and ask it to stay in your mind. Good,” he said gently, just as he’d been taught when training, trying not let the fact that Ariadne’s first attempt had perturbed him in its vividness and the apparent ease with which she achieved it. It was rare enough to find anyone who could project without a little practice, but to suppress as well? He’d never seen it. Except when he himself had first tried, he conceded, but he’d had a great deal more knowledge and understanding to his name.

 

“I know,” she said, making him frown. Ego was one thing, but surely she wasn’t that big headed...

“That this isn’t real,” she clarified.

“How?” he asked cautiously.

“Reality is imperfect,” she said, looking at the spot where her father had been, then at Arthur, her face still again with one perfectly placed eyebrow punctuating her words. “This is just too perfect to be anything but dream.”

 

* * *

The four beat pulse of the train powering over the rails lulled Arthur as he sat on the low couchette, his elbows resting on the table as he watched France vanish under the veil of evening. The veil of evening, he snorted to himself, who was he, Shelley? Cobb? Trees and fields blurred past, cows and sudden explosive flocks of blackbirds rising like smoke from the ground, the houses and roads blinking in and out of his vision almost before he could make out their shapes. He was tired, but then fourteen days of examining handwritten marginalia with a fine tooth comb would do that to a person he decided. No wonder he was gabbling romantic garbage to himself.

 

It was week to the day after their first dream together Ariadne had asked him if he was satisfied the letters were Cobb’s from the evidence they had. It was a cautious approach, but he took it for what it was, an acknowledgement of their equal skills and status. “I am,” he said, nodding as she mirrored him.

“So am I. So let’s focus on the margin notes,” she had paused again, then carefully taken one of the letters, the one where Mal had written about sedative blending, and laid it next to a volume of Cobb’s work. “We know that in this book there is a design that became part of a military installation, a guard tower to be exact, in a mountain range.” She opened the page. “Here at the edge, where the leg of the tower meets the ground.” She pointed, letting Arthur lean over to see: _dream level sedation using phased doses? Is the response sympathetic or partly expected?_

Under which Cobb’s writing scrawled Doctor Kabir, then two sharp underlines.

Ariadne calmly took Mal’s letter and laid it down. “Now, we verified her writing in New York with notes she made for Stephen. So if this is hers —” she slid the copy under the book until the word _sedation_ and _sedative_ were next to each other “— the writing should look alike.” She leant forwards, and Arthur realised they were both inches from the surface, faces almost touching as they traced the word.

 

“Well?” he asked quietly. He could see it, he knew he could, but he had to hear it from her.

Ariadne was silent a moment longer. “It appears to be hers,” she said non-commitally. “We’ll need to compare more than one, but —”

“So she wrote in Cobb’s notebooks?”

“It looks that way.”

“And some of the notes refer to layered dreaming, don’t they?”

“You’ve seen them,” Ariadne said patiently. “I know that they say—”

Arthur took up the next book in line, opening it to a marked page. The inhibition of acetylcholine appears to be vital in achieving the state, but totally removing it impairs dreaming (delta group) if the initial dose works to block then reintroduce with a combination anaesthetic- time/dose? How to make the dreamers need coincide?

He put his fingertip under the word dreamers.

“Any of the letters, tell me that this isn’t her,” he said as Ariadne bent down. She sighed as she straightened back up, looking at him as he raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

“It’s very likely,” she conceded, watching as a slow grin spread over Arthur’s face, “But I want to check them all.”

“Can we contact William Eames and Yusuf Kabir with this evidence now that it’s verified?” he pushed.

“It isn’t verified yet,” she warned, then bit her lip as her expression took on a hint of the eagerness he’d seen in the dream. “But I’m going to.”

Since then they’d poured over every margin note, looking at the words and the shapes as if they were runes carved in some long forgotten cave wall, the meaning vanishing as they examined and re-examined them. The discomfort that Arthur had felt the night after their shared dream vanished as Ariadne disappeared into the work again, pouring her whole self into it without pause. Only once did she mention working in the dream state, as they had taken a break on the library balcony one day, looking towards the Sacre Coeur and the jumble of Paris roofs spread around them.

“In a dream,” she said suddenly, “How do you make the landscape? Can you make objects like you manifest people?”

“Project them? Yes, the same.” He leant on the rail, holding his coffee cup and looking at her as she studied him. “But the bigger the change, the faster the personae move towards you. It’s as if it increases their pull towards the dreamer and the subject. It also tends to make them more aggressive. No maze can hold them off forever if they want to reach you.”

“Have you been attacked by them?”

“Yes.” He swirled his drink. “They favour pulling people apart, but in military dreams they use whatever weaponry they can find. Sometimes they show up armed. I learned to fence so I have some defence against them if the worst happens. So stick close to me and everything should be fine,” he had finished, watching her small smile, and then the moment had been over.

William Eames had replied remarkably quickly to Ariadne’s email and it soon transpired that he was happy to offer them a place to stay as well as an interview. When Arthur remarked on it Ariadne had just smiled widely and said it was just like Eames, that they’d got on well when she’d gone to visit him to ask him about Cobb and so she’d stayed then too. Eames hadn’t said anything about Arthur or the times he’d refused him, so he felt forced to ask: “You did mention me?”

“Yes,” Ariadne said underlining something in one of Mal’s letters. “The invitation is for us both. What can I say?” She shrugged as she looked at him and Arthur resisted the spike of jealousy in his throat. “Eames is never predictable. What more can you expect from a gambler?”

 _A calculated risk_ , Arthur thought sharply, but kept it to himself.

So now they were speeding across country in a private compartment that Ariadne had secured with an extra eighty euros. The Blue Train was not the Agatha Christie invention of polished walnut panels and cut glass screens any more; instead it was clean, compact and came with a sleeping bag rather than sheets and blankets to bed down in. Ariadne had taken the left side of the couchette without a word, leaving him to the right. Back to back they had arranged their night clothes and wash bags on their bunks, sliding their cases and the PASIV away. Ariadne had left to fetch some coffee and food, leaving him to all but fall asleep on the table, yawing hugely when she shook him and put a wrapped sandwich in front of him.

“We should review everything before meeting them tomorrow,” she had said as they ate, bites of soft fresh bread and cheese tasting better than Arthur could recall anything having done before, although he decided that was the exhaustion at work, which would certainly explain the slow arrival of one word in his language centre.

“Them? I thought we were meeting William Eames?”

“He and Yusuf live together,” she said as if she was stating something everyone knew. He replayed all the information he had in his memory about them, everything he could recall Ariadne saying and yet was still left holding the revelation like an unexploded grenade.

“They’re a couple?” Arthur heard the stupidly strained note in his voice and saw Ariadne’s answering frown.

“Is it a problem if they are? I can see them alone if you have issues with it.”

“No, no, no...” he said hurriedly, “It’s just— everyone from the Chrysalis Project seemed to go their separate ways after mid 1956. Mal was dead. Cobb and Miles stopped working together. Satio went back to Japan after a while on the East Coast. The Fischers went back to Australia. Yusuf Kabir got married and went to Kenya and William Eames worked in West Germany on and off for two decades. They never seemed to meet or even correspond and I’d never found evidence that that had changed. I’ve always wondered why, of course, but no one has ever really answered me definitively.”

“Why does it surprise you?” Ariadne sipped her coffee as he paused.

“Camaraderie.” She winced slightly as he pronounced the word. “Fraternity made through shared experience. It’s what makes the bonds that bind families and friends together.”

“Perhaps it takes more than that.” Ariadne tilted her head on one side, her hair falling onto her shoulder. “More than just being in the same place at the same time and with the same taste in beer. The unmeasurable third. The tertia non data.” She smiled at him, her expression soft in the pale light.

“Mystery not history?” he asked with a smile of his own.

“Yes, exactly that.”

 

* * *

The house was bright white against the Mediterranean sky, wedding cake icing white, blinding as a star seen too close up. Arthur squinted up at it, shielding his eyes and staring at the modernist tower of off centred blocks patched here and there with caramel wood and tinted glass. The tipsy building sat serenely in the large garden studded with palms, olive and walnut trees. Barely in sight below the line of the achingly green lawn was the jagged line of grey rocks meeting the wrinkled shimmer of the sea. It reminded him powerfully of the coast at Laguna Beach and Crystal Cove, the summer his family had driven from Orange County to Sonoma up Highway 1, his little sister saying the sea was the colour of sapphires and aquamarines as she dipped her fingers in the warm water. The air smelt of lavender, thyme, salt and dust, oily and organic in the warm day, and there was no more noise than the faint hush of the waves and Ariadne, crunching over the gravel with her overnight bag in hand.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said as she took in the view.

"Who would have though research paid so well," Arthur replied dryly as she looked at him, letting her lips curve up slightly into a smile.

"Yusuf and William have lived here since Yusuf's wife died fifteen years ago. The house is William's."

"So he says he bought this with what he earned from consulting?"

"Of course. Why would I lie about something like that?"

They both turned at the sound of the lazy upper class English accent. A spry looking man with close cut silver hair and clear, sharp grey eyes was watching them from the front door. He was dressed for the heat of the day in a fine white shirt and dark pants, his hands tucked in his pockets as he leant against the frame with a slight smile. "Doctor Portier," he added warmly as Ariadne hurried to meet him, greeting her with a familiar double kiss. "Ariadne, it’s good to see you again." He held her arms for a moment as he looked her over, his smile widening as she replied.

"And you, Eames. You look well."

"Age shall not wither me nor custom stale," he said sombrely before he looked back at Arthur. "Is this your colleague?" His eyes narrowed by the merest fraction as Ariadne held out her hand and made the introductions.

"Doctor Arthur Moss, William Eames." The older man's handshake was firm as he examined Arthur, almost like a father meeting his daughter's prom date, Arthur thought.

"The tenacious young American." Eames inclined his head slightly. "I hear Stephen gifted you his papers. Charmed to meet you at last."

"Likewise," Arthur replied neutrally, trying to weigh the situation as best he could. Part of him was hugely excited, finally in the presence of one of the pioneers of shared dreaming and at liberty to ask whatever he wanted, a moment he had imagined so many times before. But he was acutely aware he was meeting someone who had become familiar through books and interviews, the second hand shape of other people's words moulding his impressions, making him feel an odd, false camaraderie. The schism between knowing him and not knowing him at all yawned open at Arthur's feet, coupled with the embarrassment of having been rude in Eames' hearing. It left him tongue tied, and he covered it with an expression he hoped was sober and serious.

Eames raised his eyebrows as he let Arthur's hand go, leaving him uncertain as to whether he'd passed muster or not.

 

"I see you've brought it." Eames indicated the metal case clutched in Arthur's other hand and made a rueful face. "Well, come in. Yusuf is on the terrace, he'll be overjoyed to see you again, Ariadne. Luckily you're both just in time for breakfast."

 

The terrace turned out to be a wide expanse of dry white stone at the border between the lawn and the house, shielded from the sun by a canopy of vines, their hand shaped leaves casting thick splatters of shadow amid pools of sunlight. A long wooden table with solid looking, antique chairs was positioned under it to catch both the sea breeze and the view across the lawn, the pool and off to the sea.

 

Seated at the table was a dark skinned man, his shape evidently rounded by age as he had fine, grey curls of hair covering his head and a pair of thick glasses balanced on his nose. He was holding the morning paper and making a disapproving _tsk_ as he read. Before Eames could speak he said, "Listen to this: ‘Last night Robert Fischer, current co-chair of the board of Proclus Industries, said he had no plans to retire as he approached his eighty second birthday. _"Age has not affected my ability to make good decisions or focus on the important challenges that lie ahead."_ ’ All that complaining he did about not wanting to become his daddy and then fifty years later he's acting like Maurice mark two. I bet he still bends people's ears about him, you know; little _snot_ ," he finished cheerfully.

"He's only just younger than you, you know." Eames smiled and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Our guests are here, by the way, if you're done being rude about Robert."

 

"Ah!" He dropped his paper and pushed his glasses atop his head, making a halo of disordered waves. "Ariadne." He beamed and rose carefully from his seat, extending his hands. "It's wonderful to see you."

"This is Doctor Moss, I take it?" he added when Ariadne had greeted him as warmly as she had Eames.

"My colleague," Ariadne clarified. "A psychologist and a historian."

Yusuf Kabir's handshake and smile were easier than William Eames', but his eyes were just as sharp and searching.

"This must be a coup for you. You've been chasing us for years."

"It's an honour, sir," Arthur admitted gravelly.

"Is it now?" Yusuf beamed again as Eames snorted with amusement. "Well, let's hope we can live up to our promise."

 

Neither man batted an eyelid as he and Ariadne took their seats and, with only a small nod of acknowledgement from their hosts, began to spread plastic sleeved documents into the spaces between the breakfast dishes, the coffee pot and jugs of juice and iced water. Yusuf leant forward to watch the process, observing the placement of the letters, the notebook pages and the plans, touching some of the documents with a curious fingertip but not speaking. Eames sat back in his chair and after a short interval took out a silver lighter and a packet of Gauloises, lighting one with studied pleasure then alternating inhales with sips of coffee.

"Well," he said when they were done, "What do we have here?" He clamped his cigarette between his lips and plucked up the nearest document, Dom's first letter to Mallorie, reading it rapidly before handing it to Yusuf and frowning down the table at them both. "Well?" he asked again pointedly.

 

"This is a collection of correspondence between Dominick Cobb and Mallorie Miles. We've verified it against —"

Eames waved Ariadne's words away.

"I know what it is. What I want to know is why you think it’s relevant after all this time?"

 

Yusuf set down Dom's letter and reached for the first of Mallorie's.

 

Arthur tried instead. "Mr. Eames, we believe that Dominick and Mallorie were conducting experiments into multi-levelled dreaming and that they may have been successful. The letters show that they investigated the possibilities, created a joint notebook of theories and ideas and that they shared PASIV dreams whenever they were able to go unobserved. If they succeeded and we could find definitive proof then it could change our understanding of PASIV therapy and whole branches of neuroscience and psychology in the process."

He let his eagerness carry him as he warmed to his subject, switching his attention from one man to another as they listened.

"Mallorie Miles is key in all of this, she was the one with the understanding of the science and the ability to translate the techniques she had seen used by her father, Saito, and Fischer with you and Robert to create a stable and coherent dream. She was the one who read the research and formulated the basis for what they did. Cobb could have created the structure but she was the one who would have developed the method, I'm certain."

 

Eames dragged on his cigarette. "Mallorie is dead. Cobb is dead. They're past caring who gives a fuck about them and what they did, if they ever did it. This is ancient history, Doctor Moss, best left buried with them. Go and find your Golden Goose elsewhere."

 

"No," Arthur heard himself speak before he could restrain himself or calm his voice. "I need — we need to know. Not just for scholarship, glory, or money and definitely not for notoriety, but because we've come this far and we've discovered this much. These two people," he jabbed a finger at the collected papers, "they could have found something that changes the way we think about everything we are; our consciousness, ourselves, how we're made and —"

 

Next to him Ariadne inhaled sharply, making him stumble to a stop and let her take over.

"We have extremely strong evidence indicating Mallorie developed a new dreaming technique with Dominick Cobb, possibly using Somnacin blends of her own devising in concert with his theories of three dimensional mazes or layered scenarios." Yusuf put a soothing hand on Eames' knee as Ariadne's voice carried smoothly on. "That she used her own expertise and intellect to create something outside the stated parameters of the Chrysalis Project, not by accident or to impress, but simply because she saw potential and wanted to explore it. Everything you see here supports this scenario as well as the close relationship between herself and Dominick Cobb, but in itself is not a definitive or conclusive proof. If you can enlighten us any further then I would ask that you share what you know. Mallorie deserves to be remembered as more than just a daughter or a secretary. If she was a pioneer then that's what the world should see her as, don't you think?"

 

"If you would just read it," Arthur said as calmly as he could, biting back the frustration in his throat. "Tell us anything you remember that might be of use. Or better..."

"Dream with you?" Yusuf lifted his eyebrows over his glasses.

"If you would be able to."

 

Eames covered Yusuf's hand with his own and a look passed between them.

 

"We'd like to look at your research first and talk it over, if you could give us a day or so?" Yusuf looked from Arthur to Ariadne, his placating tone belying the fact they had little choice but to consent.

"Of course. We'll answer any questions you have," Ariadne added, "and thank you for considering it."

 

* * *

  
  



	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For warnings and disclaimers - see chapter one

~*~

They left Eames and Yusuf alone and walked down to the beach.

 

The clear Mediterranean water flung itself against the rocks, sending spray up around the slim headlands that cupped the small, private bay. Ariadne was quiet, her face lost under her huge sunglasses and wide brimmed hat, the loose tunic and khakis she had changed into covering her from neck to ankles. He sat down on the sand, arms around his knees while she walked to the strandline, slipping off her shoes and paddling in the water where it lapped the shore. Her toenails were painted a bright poppy red that glistened in the sun, her small, pale feet planted firmly in the sand. He watched her there for a while before he spoke.

 

“Do you think they’ll say yes?”

 

Ariadne turned from where she’d been brooding on the horizon, her canvas sandals swinging from her fingers. “I’m not sure. Eames seemed keen in his email, but that was before we told them what we wanted.”

“I didn’t mean to lose it like that with him.” Arthur rested his chin on his knees as she watched him with the opaque lenses of her glasses. “Something about him just made me snap. He was so —”

“Casual? Dismissive?” she tried.

“Not like the sources suggested. I was expecting him to be more vocal, more extravagant, maybe warmer. Everyone calls him charming. Even you.”

“He is charming.” Ariadne settled on the sand next to him and stretched out her feet to the sun. “But I think he was trying to gauge how serious we are for both their sakes.”

 

The sea rolled in and back while they listened to it for a moment. Ariadne lifted her head to sniff the breeze blowing off the water, then dropping her hat to the ground so it could catch her hair. Arthur watched it unfurl behind her, the ragged ends whipping in the sunlight, a lush tumble of warm brown. “It’s like a mane,” he said aloud, and then added when she frowned, “Your hair. It looks nice like that, like it’s alive.”

She made a strange self deprecating face, bunching it and releasing it with a shake. “My vanity; _hair is a woman’s crowning glory_. You can’t get away with too many vanities if you want to be taken seriously as a scholar, but this one is mine. It feels good to let it breathe,” she sighed happily, “to take off my shoes for a bit.”

“Perhaps we should both change clothes, let the sun and air get to our skin. After the two months I feel like I’ve been indoors my whole life.” He looked at her, wrapped in her layers. “Aren’t you hot?”

 

She eyed him, taking in his cotton shirt and slim khaki pants, sleeves rolled and top button undone. “Says the man with his shoes on.” She pointed at the offending articles, defiantly laced up.

“OK.” He reached down and tugged at the bows, wrenching his shoes off and stretching out like her, his feet appearing huge and slightly comical next to hers as he wriggled his toes. “You should let your skin breathe too, you know. We could do a deal: I could take off my shirt and you could take off your pants then we’d both be nearer being naked.” He tempered the word with a smile, but she didn’t offer hers in return, and he realised with trepidation he might have hit a nerve. “That was supposed to be funny. You don’t have to dress a particular way for me or anyone else to take you seriously.”

 

Ariadne stayed watching the water in silence for a while.

“I shouldn’t,” she said tiredly, “but this isn’t some post-feminist fairyland where people only see my brain and not the wrappings. You can only shake it off so many times before you get sick of the back stabbing and the whispering about what you did to get where you are. It’s easier not to show anything below your neck or above your wrists or else they talk about what a tramp you’re being. People saying you’re anorexic because you’re so thin, talking bullshit about how you don’t eat, or that you work out all the time so you look good. If you don’t date you’re a lesbian, if you do you’re a slut. If you want to get married and have children then you’re a submissive dimwit who can’t think beyond curtains. If you want to be single, care about your career and couldn’t care less about having kids then you’re a self centred bitch. Everything you do gets recast as a calculated move to get the world to see you a certain way. You can’t be any degree of both, you have to be one or the other. This or that. Grey or brown. I thought being an academic would excuse me from all that shit, but some days it’s just like high school.”

“I can’t imagine you doing something you didn’t want to because of what someone else thinks.”

“You can shut the noise out,” she told the horizon, “but it never stops. You just learn not to let it show when you do hear. We’re supposed to be all about giving each other freedom of choice, but instead we all pass judgement like a fence of old crows. So you put on your coats of armour and keep on going. “ She smiled wryly.

“Is that why you’re interested in Mallorie?”

“Because she kept on going in spite of what she was told by everyone around her?” Ariadne tilted her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps. I like that while Cobb was sending her poetry she was asking him about dream techniques and design instead of falling over sideways in a swoon every time.” Ariadne grinned suddenly. “She carried on and did things without him, tried solo dreams and her own theories, then told him once she’d done it and couldn’t be reined in. She’s always been this pretty little doll who her father cherished, but really she was passionate, bright and had a voice. Why did we never know that before? Why was everyone so happy to look at the outside of her and accept she was nothing but an ornament? Is it because we’re so busy telling ourselves women were discouraged from doing things like that that we don’t see when they do? Or that the concept she could have been a researcher, a dream technologist, a daughter and someone’s lover is just asking too much? One thing and not the other and never the two shall meet.” She looked at Arthur consideringly for a moment, then stood up with a decisive finality. “OK, I think we should try your idea.”

 

He was startled for a second as her hands fumbled under her tunic; buttons and zippers released with a swift ease then the fabric dropped down her legs and she stepped out, smiling at him with some secret delight as he tried not to stare at her fine grained skin and delicate ankles and knees. “Shirt,” she pointed at him, her tunic lapping around her thighs as the breeze caught the hem.

“As you wish.” He inclined his head and unbuttoned it as casually as he could, flinging it on top of her khakis with a flourish, privately glad he’d not let his running or fencing practice slip in the last few months. _Vanity, thy name is Arthur_ , he chided himself then declared out loud, “There, now we’re even.”

Ariadne stretched out next to him again, her smile still private but happy, he decided, relaxed and happy. “Yes, we are.” She looked him over. “This was a good idea. Thanks,” she added with a slightly forced casualness.

“For what? Making you take your clothes off?”

“For letting me just be myself,” she said seriously.

 

Arthur let her eyes pin his without flinching or backing down. _Likewise_ , he realised instantly with the same jolt he’d felt that night in Paris, but his mouth fumbled and it slipped out as a politeness instead.

“You’re welcome.”

 

* * *

Dinner was a fine meal, served in dining room on plain white china the same brilliant hue as the house itself. Generous bowls of tiny rosy shrimp steamed with butter, lemon, garlic and wine came with chunks of bread to catch the juices; rustling piles of thin frites, sunny gold and speckled with crystals of salt alongside perfectly browned steaks and billowy portions of salad; a chocolate soufflé that was a breath of sweet darkness melting in his mouth until all that was left was its sharp echo on his tongue; shards of crumbly white cheese and velvet mouthfuls of figs with coffee served in demi tasse cups as thin as paper.

Ariadne sat opposite him, eating with her fingers when allowed, her lips shiny with butter as she plucked at her shrimp or plump with fruit juice as she bit into a fig. Locks of her hair had worked themselves free of their pinned up style, falling down her neck to curl at the collar of her shirt and her skin was warm, golden and pink tinged in the rich light. She could be Artemis, feasting after the hunt, he thought giddily, the wine and brandy making his blood warm as listened to her laugh with Yusuf. Bright Athena, her spear and helm laid aside as she met with poets, philosophers and heroes.

 

The warm comfort of a full stomach and their two agreeable hosts entertaining them meant that once the dishes were cleared Arthur was slightly jolted by Eames pouring more coffee, settling back with his hands folded on the table and clearing his throat.

 

"We've discussed your proposal," he paused and glanced at Yusuf who nodded reassuringly. "We're no longer young men. We take each day as it comes and thank God for whatever it brings, especially if it’s the chance to see another, and we've only got this far by learning when to hang on and when to let things slide —" he smiled at Yusuf " — and when to say fuck it and take the risk. You’ve probably wondered why we’ve refused you for so long, Doctor Moss. The truth is that we didn’t want our relationship to become some kind of salacious backdrop to the history of the Chrysalis Project. We spent long enough keeping it a secret because we had to, without it turning into _Gay Lovers Discover Shared Dreams for Forbidden Sex Romps_. We felt that if you investigated us it would come out whether we liked it or not, so my lawyer was instructed to always refuse your requests. We’ve lived through a lot to get to where we are: a marriage each, three children, long separations, being criminals for the sake of a kiss or two, and we’re lucky. We didn’t want to upset our peace; we only accepted Ariadne because she wanted to talk about Cobb. Then when you came back to us with the news you’d found out something about Mal — well, we asked ourselves if it wasn’t time to be more up front, to let you in and answer your questions. To dream with you. This is the twenty-first century after all, what harm can a pair of stately homos do?” He smiled at Yusuf.

“I think we might be called bisexuals nowadays, dear heart.”

“ _Tomaeto_ , _tomahtoe_ ,” he replied dryly. “Experiences, not people.”

"Thank you." Ariadne reached out awkwardly and closed her hand over Eames’. "Thank you for helping us."

"There is an element of risk for people of your age," Arthur began.

"We're quite aware of the risks of Somnacin use, Doctor Moss," Yusuf said calmly, "We worked with the drug when it was in its infancy and infinitely more dangerous to the self. We are both in good health despite our years,  have no contraindicated heart, lung or brain conditions and we fully understand what you are asking. We are both happy to undertake your request. Tomorrow, if that is agreeable?"

 

Arthur paused for a moment, running through the PASIV set up in his mind — if he ran the diagnostic tonight, loaded the doses and prepped all the leads then they could begin after breakfast, dream for a hour or so, then begin recording and cross correlating — "Of course. May I ask," and he felt the weight of their attention on him, Eames especially, "what made you decide to do it?"

Eames toyed with his cup before he answered. "It was what you said about Mal." He looked at Ariadne. "That she deserved to be remembered better. For all these years, no one has had any idea how brilliant, driven and blinded by her own convictions she could be. They say love comes unsuspecting, don't they? To realise that you loved someone and for it to be too late for you to have the chance to tell them. That all you can do then is keep their memory close and safe." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Then to realise that when you die your memory of them goes with you, that you're not protecting them after all. She was my friend and I owe it to her to pass my memory on," he finished.

"Their letters were very moving, for us both," Yusuf said after a long pause. "It bought back many memories. We had no idea that she and Cobb were so close before her death. Stephen was a very protective father, even after she was gone. If we can help you see her as we did and that can help you, then we would like to share what we know."

 

Arthur watched the two men, their eyes meeting across the table as they bore the weight of their years together: love comes unsuspecting.

 

* * *

That night he lay in the cool space of his bed, the soft dark of the unfamiliar room and listened to the waves breaking on the shore in their constant lulling rhythm. He folded his hands so his palms were flat on his chest, feeling his heart beat under his skin. He could hear Ariadne moving around in the next room, her steps light and unhurried as she prepared for bed then settled in, propped on her pillows with a book in her hands he imagined. Could she hear the water too, he wondered as he lay there, was she there with him, on that beach, like the one Cobb and Mallorie saw, right at the end of the world?

 

* * *

Despite his small anxiety over it, Arthur managed to set the PASIV and connect them all with barely a hitch. Ariadne had winced at the needle sting but made no complaint and Yusuf and Eames handled their own lines with the careless air of people who had endured more barbaric times. Eames had even wriggled his hand cheerfully and sighed, "God, you can barely feel it. I love this century. Alright?" He brushed a gentle finger over the back of Yusuf's hand, carefully avoiding the lead, as he settled back on the couch.

"Fine," Yusuf replied as their fingers meshed together, "I can't wait."

"You?" Arthur touched Ariadne's shoulder cautiously.

"Ready," she said firmly, her body line tight against the chair.

 

He took his seat, set the player for the cue and depressed the switch. He barely had time to lean back as he tasted the sweetness of the drug in the back of his throat, his eyelids dipped, and the sun bright room dissolved.

 

* * *

Arthur forgot every time how rapidly shared dreams began. No lead in or gentle awakening, just in cold and fast as a morning after the night before. He was still sitting, since his body was arranged in that posture, but his clothes were different against his skin, the fabric stiff with starch, and the air smelt strongly of wax, bleach, burnt coffee and cigarettes. His eyes snapped open to find he was sitting next to Ariadne on a low couch covered with bright orange nubbled fabric at the side of a large and very familiar room. Dark wooden desks strewn with papers took up one side of it, the other was more open plan, their couch set under a large window with a low coffee table making one area; a chalk board, a large drafting table creating another and a water cooler pushed into a corner next to a drip coffee maker making a third.

 

Yusuf and Eames were sitting opposite them on an identical couch, but it took Arthur a moment to recognise them. Their faces were younger, their hair dark and their skin unmarred, just as the Chrysalis Project photos had captured them.

 

"Like it?" Eames said dryly. "Our halcyon days, revisited. Oh, we pretty things. We did you the courtesy of sharpening you up a tad too," he smiled sharply as Arthur glanced down at himself. "London's finest single breasted three piece in pinstriped grey wool courtesy of Gieves & Hawkes, Thomas Pink French cuff Egyptian cotton shirt and a rather nice tie courtesy of Sulka. While Doctor Portier is modelling a Dior silk and wool skirt and merino jumper rather beautifully, _mais oui_?” He drawled like a lazy salesman reading from a catalogue, “You need to fit in here, after all."

"We're in the project office." Arthur glanced around. "I recognise it. This is —" he turned to Ariadne, who was sitting next to him in a neat navy blue pencil skirt and twin sweaters, her hair in a glossy chignon. Her face was wide open with wonder.

"How is this even possible?" she said to herself, turning and catching Arthur's eyes so he could see her amazement. "I've never —" she broke off and laughed suddenly, catching him off guard as he smiled back like an idiot. "This is amazing. All from your heads?"

"Pure, one hundred percent memory recall," Yusuf said. "Outside is one of the basic Cobb designs, of course, but in here —" he tapped his forehead "— all us."

"I — amazing," she said again looking down at herself, then cautiously putting out her hand and touching the lapel of Arthur's jacket, pinching it between her finger and thumb.

"Practice." Eames lit a cigarette and waved it casually in the air. "I was always better than Robert at making the dream do what I wanted, rather than letting it run over me roughshod, wasn't I?" He grinned at Yusuf, who reached out and cupped his cheek in his hand, smiling back fondly.

"Yes, yes, you were. Shall we show them what else we can do?"

 

"Why not?" Eames squeezed Yusuf's hand then stood. Footsteps came clearly from outside the door, a tapping beat that stopped as the door handle turned and it swung open, framing a willowy figure dressed in a grey tweed skirt and jacket, a pile of papers held at her hip, her dark head smooth and her eyes and mouth falling wide with surprise.

 

"Will?" Her accent was rounded and soft when she spoke. "Will, you're here."

"Hello, Mallorie," he replied gently as she came towards him, dropping her work on one of the desks and raising her hands to touch his face. She neither acknowledged nor so much as looked at her audience; he, Ariadne and Yusuf might as well have been the ghosts, not her.

"You're here," she said again, "Papa told me you were in Charlotte. Oh, Will, thank God." He put his arms around her as her face buried in his neck and her hands gripped his shoulders.

"Are you alright?" He bent his head towards her ear but she pulled back suddenly, her smile bright.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

"You seem upset."

"Papa and I had a fight, that's all. You know how he is with me." Her eyes darted to the window and back and she lowered her voice, "I need — I need a favour Will, a discrete favour."

"Of course. Whatever you need," he reassured her.

"Can you get me a driving license and a social security card in a different name? You know people from before who got them for you, don't you?"

Eames' brow wrinkled in surprise. "What for? Mal, are you in trouble?"

"No!" Her colour rose sharply as she pulled away from him. "I need to get away, Will," she tried again. "Papa is suffocating me here. I have some friends in San Francisco who've offered me a place to stay, but I can't go as myself or he'll report me missing and I'll be dragged back here by the police. I need your help," she pleaded, "or I'll be stuck here for good. You're the only one who can help me." She took his hands in hers. "Please, Will, before I go crazy in this house."

Eames looked at her, his face serious as she stood before him, waiting for him to speak.

"Please," she repeated quietly.

"Alright," he assented as she stepped forwards and brushed his cheek with her lips. "I can speak to some of my old friends. Give me a few days."

"Thank you," she took his face in her hands again. "You've saved my life, dear one."

"Don't exaggerate." Eames rolled his eyes with a smile.

"You have," she insisted, backing away and gathering up her work, "You truly have."

 

"When I gave her the papers I made her promise to write to me once she was settled," Eames said to her back as she turned away, "But they sent me to West Germany a week later. I was there for just over a year and by the time I got her letter it was too late. She'd been dead for three months and the first I knew of it was when I arrived back here. This was pretty much the last time I saw her." His hands bunched into fists at his sides, his cigarette burning near his knuckles as he stared at the closed door.

 

"What name were the forged papers in?" Ariadne asked.

"Mary Margaret Hooper ," Eames replied blandly, "I told her then she could be Molly or Mol, which was pretty close to Mal in case she ever got confused and gave the wrong name.”

“Did it falsify anything else apart from her name?”

“Not that I remember. I might have changed the year she was born by a few because that was a standard trick, but the rest stayed the same. It makes it easier to lie if you’re just trying to hold a couple in your head.”

"Where was Dominick Cobb?"

"Georgia."

"And she was still living here with her parents when you left?"

"Yes."

"Did she mention when she was planning to leave?"

"No."

 

"Perhaps we should show them something else now?" Yusuf prompted gently, rising to stand at Eames' side. "Something older?" Eames jerked his head as if he was shaking the memory off.

"Yes. Yes, of course." He turned to face Arthur and Ariadne. "Cobb and Mal, as we knew them." He raised his hand with a flourish and suddenly a man's voice bled into the room.

 

"All I'm saying, Dominick, is that this is an unworkable model."

Two men were now standing at the drawing board, one younger, his hands on his hips and his face knotted into a frown as the older tapped the paper spread across the surface with the arm of his glasses: Dominick Cobb and Stephen Miles. "You know the limitations of the dreamer's capacity," Stephen continued, "above all they need familiarity in order that the dream is stable enough to run the combat scenarios in. If we put in optical illusions like this then they're going to spend so much time trying to hold it the rest of the dream will disintegrate."

"But this is just an elaboration on the mazes." Cobb's voice was clear and cross. "It’s no more difficult to integrate into the plans than a labyrinth. The next workable step is to use three dimensions of complexity as a defence and a scenario. William can hold them, can't you?" His attention lit on Eames.

"I can," he replied.

"See? Robert can learn from William. This is possible," he insisted.

"Dominick, please," Stephen folded his glasses away and tucked them in his breast pocket. "If this is a misguided attempt to push the dreamers into deeper and more complex dreams that you believe may be possible without any evidence that they can tolerate it, then I will be forced to stop you. The intention here is to create a working dream that can be shared and used, not to experiment with people's minds."

"Isn't that what we already do?" Cobb snapped and Stephen sighed.

"Mallorie, can you finish up here and bring me the latest set of plans when you're done?" As he stepped away from the drawing board Mallorie's seated figure was clearly visible, seated alongside it with a pen and notebook in her hand. "Yes, Doctor Miles."

"Thank you. Cool down, Dominick," he said as Cobb turned back to the drawings in front of him. "Let this go."

Cobb muttered something under his breath as Stephen left, finally dropping his pencil and making for the coffee jug. "This is ridiculous," he turned to Eames suddenly, his eyes blazing. "You can do it! Why won't he damn well let us just try?"

"It’s a big step," Mallorie said firmly as she wrote. "Stable dreams have only been possible for a year or so, and that only happened because they changed the way they administered Somnacin to the subjects."

"He's being deliberately obtuse about it. This has so much potential and we're puttering around at the edges like kids." Cobb raked his fingers over his scalp.

"Be fair to him, Mr. Cobb." Mallorie looked up and smiled suddenly, seeing his disordered hair and angry face. "He has to calculate the risk. Somnacin is a powerful drug. You're asking him to make a judgement based on nothing more than a gut feeling." Cobb's shoulders dropped as he exhaled in defeat, slouching to the coffee maker and splashing some in a cup. Mallorie returned to her notes, flicking back a few pages and sifting through the plans on the board. "Doctor Kabir," she turned her head towards Yusuf, "May I have the report on Somnacin combinations with secobarbital and amobarbital, please?"

"Of course," he passed her a sheaf of papers that she began to read, her pen between her teeth as she scanned, so she didn't notice Cobb approaching her until he cleared his throat noisily. She looked up with one eyebrow carefully raised.

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry, Miss Miles. This isn't your fault." He held out a mug of coffee. "A peace offering, with my apologies." He gave her a small smile that widened as she took the cup, their fingers overlapping as she inclined her head graciously.

"No need to apologise, Mr. Cobb, but thank you for your consideration. You know my father is rarely difficult out of spite. He has to have good reasons for rejecting the idea of more complex dreams."

"What do you think, Miss Miles?" Cobb asked suddenly, "Do you think he's right?"

 

She stared back at him for a moment, her blue eyes unflinching as if she was weighing something in her mind, then she caught sight of Yusuf and snapped back to herself. "I think I need to take him these." She swept up the plans and stepped away from Cobb. "Thank you for the drink," she added as she backed out of the room.

"Well." He turned back to Eames and Yusuf with a smile. "Daddy's girl to the last it seems."

"He keeps her on a pretty short lead," Eames said, "He wants to keep her safe and she appreciates that. Don't blame her for siding with him."

"I'm not." Cobb turned back to his drawings. "All I'm saying is that she could have an opinion or two of her own for once."

 

The scene shifted and suddenly Cobb was whirling around to face them, his manner agitated and flustered. His hands were spread wide , held out from his body and dark, wet spots were marking his pale green shirt. Mallorie was standing with her back to the drawing board in a full skirted sundress covered in huge, printed red roses. Her eyes were pink and one hand covered her mouth and nose.

"Will, I didn't hear you come in." He  flushed pink. "Mallorie isn't feeling too well and —" Eames brushed him off and took her free hand.

"Mal? What is it? Do you need your mother?" She looked at him wide eyed, then screwed them shut as if she was in pain, she jerked her hand out of his and ran from the room in flurry of fabric.

"What happened?" Eames frowned at Cobb. "Was she sick on you or something?"

"Oh? No," he said dismissively, looking down at his clothes. "No. We were talking and she just started crying. You know how she is. She'll be OK. Mrs. Miles take care of her." He plastered on a huge smile. "How about we head into town and grab a beer?"

 

Cobb turned away and vanished. The blackboard was now covered in chemical formulae, equations and molecular diagrams. Mallorie was alone in the room, sitting on top of one of the desks, holding a cup of coffee and looking at it all with narrowed eyes.

(“What’s written up there?” Ariadne whispered.

“Somnacin variants,” Yusuf replied before Arthur could speak. “Mixtures with sedatives and other neuroactive compounds.”)

Eventually Mallorie got up and walked towards the board, running her finger around one group of symbols, then another and then sketching a line between them in the dust. Her expression was thoughtful as she tapped her fingertips against the surface, her lips pursed as she frowned then turned away, picking up her notebook and sitting back down. She propped her chin in her hand and began to write, twisting a lock of hair around her forefinger.

 

Arthur blinked and Mallorie was back in her seat by the drawing board, her pen in hand. Cobb and Miles were bent over a plan, their heads close together as Stephen spoke. "If the south elevation is placed on this line —" he drew a curve and aligned a sketch over it as Cobb leant back and finished "— it forms a loop which we can close with a parallel mirror."

"Unusual, but yes, I don't see why not." Stephen winked at Mallorie who smiled back as Cobb bent back over the design, his hair falling over his brow, his pencil tracing new lines onto the sheet. "Good idea. Now, this area to the north-west needs a lake or some kind of pool..."

 

Stephen's voice faded, there was a strange jump, and then Cobb and Malloriel were huddled by the coffee maker, their voices low until Mallorie burst into a laugh, her head going back as she covered her mouth to hide her mirth. Cobb was smiling at her fit to burst as she carried on, the noise high and happy as it bounced off the ceiling. "Oh, Doctor Kabir, I'm so sorry!" She gasped towards Yusuf. "I forgot you were here." She dissolved into snorts and coughs of laughter again, her eyes meeting Cobb's as they glistened with tears.

 

The room shimmered slightly and Cobb and Miles appeared in its centre. "You're going back to Fort Benning and that is final!" Stephen's shout was enormous as he faced up to Cobb. "I want no more argument. You'll leave this afternoon." His finger shot out and hit Cob's chest. "You'll do the job you're meant to and you will not deviate from it, are you clear?"

"Sir, if I could just explain —"

"There is nothing for you to explain! Come back to reality, Dominick! You are one step away from being removed from this project and losing ounce of credibility I've managed to help you scrape up, you've abused my faith in you, and now you have the nerve to suggest I should hear you out." He took a deep breath then spoke in a voice gone calm and cold. "Get out. Go and pack. I've nothing left to say to you." He turned away and left Cobb staring at his back, blinking in disbelief. "William, Robert, come in here!" Miles called, folding his arms and ignoring Dominick as if he'd already gone. Cobb watched him for a second, his jaw clenched tight, and then he turned on his heel and did as he had been bid.

 

Arthur could hear the cue, the slow melody of brass and strings thickened by the Somnacin to a funeral dirge as Cobb's form faded from view. As he turned back to Ariadne he could see she was still watching Dominick walk away, blinking slowly as her fingers curled together in her lap.

 

* * *

Late that evening Eames came down stairs to the living room where they were working and put a slim off white envelope on the table, pushing it towards Arthur with his fingertips. "Her letter to me," he said shortly. "The one she sent after she left home."

 

Ariadne picked it up and frowned, sitting back in her chair. "She said her friends were in San Francisco, didn't she?"

"Yes." Eames settled next to Yusuf and took a mouthful of wine from the glass he'd poured.

Ariadne looked at Arthur, her eyes sharp as they met his and she turned the envelope around to face him, her fingers pointing to the frank stamped across the top right corner in rusty black ink.

 

_Sept 21st 1955, City of Chicago, Cook Co., IL_

 

* * *

_Dear Will,_

_Before I say anything else I want you to know that I am well, happy and above all safe. I am sorry that I have no address for you to write or visit me, but I hope that I will soon. I miss you, my dear friend, and I wish I could see you so you could talk with me and make me laugh as we did back in California._

_My life here is very different. I am living in a small apartment, which is very cozy. The main window faces east, so in the mornings I can catch the sunrise over the rooftops. I have a wonderful job, working as an assistant to one of the professors at the university. He is one of the men who helped Fermi, so naturally his work is based on trying to develop and harness nuclear energy more efficiently. He imagines a cleaner, brighter world, buzzing with splitting nuclei._

_At night I dream a great deal. I wonder if this is the effect of being around you all at the project for so long? I dream of the ocean, of huge beaches that I run down with the wind pushing me along until my feet lift off the ground and I'm flying, free at last._

_I hope this finds you well and happy, dear one. It brings love and always will._

_Mallorie_

 

* * *

The Ronald Williams Library at Northeastern Illinois University was a dark brown rectangle of brick and glass, looking for all the world like it had been built from Lego then plopped down onto a plateau of fat, bleached pebbles and green fuzzy felt. Inside it was a cavern of grey white walls, dark grey carpets that might have been closely related to the grass at some point in their history, and miles of metal shelves, filling the chilly spaces with the smell of ink, paper, and plastic film.

 

Arthur sat across from Ariadne at a narrow table, awaiting the return of the student archivist who had gone to retrieve their search for any and all documents pertaining to Hooper, Mary M., dated 1955 and later. Between them were spread the original letters from Mallorie to Dom and the one sent to Eames. Ariadne was leaning over the newest find, running her fingers under the lines of text with a frown.

 

"Her handwriting changes," she said eventually. Arthur looked up from his reading of one of Cobb’s notebooks, scribbling points against some of the margin notes they’d identified as possibly Mallorie’s.

"We know it gets more cursive and bigger compared to her notes to Cobb, but look, here —" Ariadne touched the page "— her lowercase a is formed completely differently. This one is like a typed a, shaped like an ampersand, but in the note to William Eames it's simpler, like a balloon on a stick, see?"

"Could she have changed it deliberately to disguise herself? She went to a lot of trouble to change her identity, so perhaps it seemed like a logical extension? New name, maybe she changed her appearance and signature to suit it?"

"That seems like a strange thing to do. I know she was afraid Stephen would force her home, but would she really have done that?"

 

Arthur's reply was forestalled by the arrival of the young archivist, holding a buff folder less than an eighth of an inch thick. "Hooper, Mary Margaret, birth not registered in Illinois, approximate age in 1955 between twenty two and twenty seven, possible employee at UC. One hit," she said cheerfully, putting it down between them. "The copier is in the hall and you can buy a smartcard for it from the dispenser on the first floor. A list of associated names is in the back, as you requested."

 

Arthur thanked her with a nod, waited for her to vanish back into the stacks before he pulled the file to them. Ariadne's arm pressed against his as she crowded closer, the fringe of her scarf brushing the table top as he opened the cover.

 

"Oh, good God," he said slowly and without thinking as he saw the first page. "Certificate of Death, Cook County, Chicago; Mary Margaret Hooper, died May twentieth, 1956, aged twenty four years old." He paused. "Married?"

"Eames didn't mention that her new licence or social security card listed as her married."

"Cause of death, fall from seventh storey window, cerebral contusion and resultant injuries. They autopsied her.”

 

Arthur turned the page. "Postmortem record in the matter of the death of Mary Margaret Hooper. The remains are of a Caucasian woman in her middle twenties, fully developed and in good health at the time of death. There is some superficial scarring on the anterior surface of the right forearm close to the radio ulneric joint and evidence of a healed fracture to the left tibia sustained some years previously. Head: scalp is normal, hair growth and texture indicating a reasonable quality of diet pre-mortem. Multifragmental cranial and facial fractures of the frontal, nasal, zygomatic, maxillary and mandible bones consistent with falling face down can clearly be palpated through the scalp and face. The face is malformed in line with multiple fractures and tissue damage, the epidermal layer largely abraded but lack of contusion indicates death was concurrent with the impact. Cerebral spinal fluid loss has occurred through both the nasal passage. The incisors and maxilliary canine teeth have been broken. Primary incision..."

He stopped as his brain processed the words in front of him, confusion striking him dumb.

 

Ariadne took a breath. "Primary incision: breasts are normal and show lactation changes consistent with a nursing mother of approximately three months. Multiple bilateral fractures to the ribs are easily palpable on gross examination, after incision shown to have caused punctures of both lungs, with small evidence of haemothorax, likely passive post mortem haemorrhaging. Lung tissue healthy aside from damage incurred by injury. Rupture of the ascending arch of the aorta; rupture of the anterior wall of the heart by fractured ends of ribs three, four and five; heart of normal size and development pre-mortem." Ariadne's index finger skimmed under the lines of type as she noted each stark detail. "Ruptured spleen; damage to the right lobe of the liver both caused by fractured ends of the eighth and ninth ribs. Little abdominal bleeding, ah..." She slowed down and read verbatim once more. "Ovaries are healthy and show no abnormality. Uterus is normally sized and positioned, the endometrium soft and healthy. Presence of striae on the abdomen and widening of the mouth of the cervix further indicate expected post-partum changes — no. This has to be the wrong person. Eames must have got the name wrong. She can't have been pregnant. Someone at the project would have noticed, it would be in your research interviews," Ariadne insisted as Arthur looked at her.

 

"Has Mr. Eames recollection ever been poor before?"

"No," she admitted. "You've seen. He's cogent and coherent. He's never seemed to have fudged anything he's told me and if he has I’ve never found any evidence of it."

"So if on balance he's unlikely to be wrong, that leaves us with two alternatives."

"That this is the wrong Mary Margaret Hooper," Ariadne said slowly, letting her words hang, so he finished for her.

"Or that Mallorie had a baby at some time before she died. Wait —” he stopped Ariadne’s rebuttal “— this woman is the right age, has the right name and fits the other criteria we set for the search, quite aside from the fact they died in the same way.”

“It still doesn’t negate the fact that this woman is listed as married, which as far as we know she wasn’t, and that Mallorie’s death was registered in California . It’s a matter of record that she died as a result of a fall at the Miles’ home, right?”

“There is a death certificate, that’s true,” Arthur conceded. “I’ve only seen the details that were released by Stephen and Marie at the time, but we should be able to obtain a copy of it.”

 

“We should make a comparison before we jump to any conclusions,” Ariadne said firmly. She carried on turning the pages of the report over, scanning the diagrams, the measurements and blocks of text, until she flipped aside a blank sheet and there was slightly overexposed photo of a woman’s body, lying on her back on a gurney, the sheets pulled aside to show her injuries. Ariadne turned it around without comment, then gently took it out of the file, revealing more shots taken from above and the side, then detailing her head and torso.

 

Arthur moved the facial picture with his fingertips, looking at the black mottling, the broken lines and shape of the pale face, then extracted one of the Chrysalis Project photos and laid it along side. “We can make the documentary comparisons if you insist,” he eventually exhaled slowly, “But this woman is Mallorie Miles.”

 

* * *

_Witness statement given by Mrs. Elizabeth Adler, occupant Apt. 7C:_

_“I didn’t know the couple very well. They were quiet, kept to themselves — we only found out their names after they’d been here a fortnight. You’d see him coming home of an evening, sometimes he’d bring groceries or medicines and David, my husband, would help him with the bags. He’d be polite, always nice manners, but never over friendly. She worked too, some kind of secretary up on the campus, but they must have let her go or something when the baby started to show because I’d see her in the hall or slipping out of the front door. I think she liked to walk in the park, getting some fresh air to keep them both healthy, like they say to. I guess that got too much just before the little one came, because I didn’t see her at all for a month or so. I’d hear her moving around or singing a little bit with the radio, but never caught a glimpse of her until she was back from the hospital. She’d take the pram out and go for little walks, but not so much lately. We’d hear her cry sometimes, sometimes I think she’d get so angry she’d break a plate or a cup, but she never hurt anyone. You know how it is, sometimes after a new baby you feel a bit sad and lonely, and that’s all we ever thought it was. Her husband, Albert Hooper, he said she was sick and had to rest indoors, nice and quietly. I asked if they had someone to look after the baby or if Molly needed a hand and he said yes, they were doing fine and thanked me for offering my help._

_I never really heard them fighting, apart from the odd time like any married couple. He’d shout that she was wrong or off her head, she’d tell him he was a fool to himself and blind to the way things were. The baby would cry, sometimes stopping and starting for an hour or two, sometimes it was so loud I swear it woke David up. Albert always came by to say sorry the next day. I don’t think they were sleeping too well, he’d always look gray and have black circles under his eyes. I made him up a dish of supper a few times since I just felt so sorry for them by then — just some casserole or a dish of chops and potatoes, something plain to help them both get their strength up. He brought the baby around once, holding the little scrap at his shoulder while he apologised for some noise, said Molly had had a bad afternoon. The baby looked well, a little small for two months, but then my boys had been bruisers. Bright blue eyes like Molly and Albert’s, and a charming little smile even if it was likely gas. Albert let me hold the kiddie for a bit while he took the supper I’d put aside, and I never saw anything wrong, no bruises or marks, well cared for as any child of my own._

_I hadn’t seen them this week, but then we were away for a long weekend at David’s sister’s upstate and not back until this afternoon. It must have been around seven when I heard some glass break and them shouting, then they calmed down and I thought...I never thought — I heard him shout, then someone screamed down in the street. David ran to the window and his face went white as a ghost. He said “Molly.”_

_“What about Molly?” I think I asked._

_“She’s in the street, Lizzie. We need to go down there.”_

_I thought he meant she’d tripped or the pram was broken, not that she’d jumped. I never thought she was crazy, just sad or a little blue maybe, not that she would hurt herself. I can remember hearing the baby crying as we ran down the stairs, then Albert shouting, “Mol, Mol, Jesus Christ, Mol.”_

_There were people all around her and she was lying on the ground, face down. David cleared them away, made them stop staring at her. Albert was just hanging out of the window, looking down at her, his face all twisted up like he was going to shout again. I ran in and borrowed a blanket to cover her with, then we kept everyone away until you came. I can’t forget his face, looking down at her. I don’t think he could see us any more, just her, poor lamb.”_

* * *

_Summary report by Sergeant Richard Fillmore, 9th District; investigating officer in the matter of Mrs. M. Hooper:_

_I arrived on the scene to find that the deceased was lying on the ground having fallen from the window of the seventh storey apartment she shared with her family. My initial examination of the scene led me to conclude that the deceased had either thrown herself with some force or possibly had been pushed through the glass, dying on impact. Fragments of glass were clearly visible on the ground around the body and on removing the covering that neighbours had provided it was clear that glass shards were also in the deceased’s hair and clothing._

_My first interview was with her husband, Mr. Albert Hooper, who explained to me that in the months leading up to her accident Mrs. Hooper had shown signs of nervous fatigue and volatile moods above and beyond that normally experienced by the female gender. She had given birth approximately three months before her accident and Mr. Hooper also stated that she had had a difficult time adjusting to the role of wife and mother, her previous work as a secretary at UC having kept her occupied and mentally stimulated. She had been upset that evening, Mr. Hooper claimed, and they had fought, leading Mrs. Hooper to break some china dishes and a vase. He seemed agitated and unable to calm himself through our interview, particularly when asked how the fall had occurred — he was unable to clarify if Mrs. Hooper had thrown herself with any force or if they had struggled and he had pushed her, by accident or design. He made no mention of the care or whereabouts of their child. In the course of later conversations it became clear that the other tenants — except Mrs. Elizabeth Adler and her husband (see attached statements 2a & b) — rarely saw the baby or Mrs. Hooper after she gave birth, although she was overheard crying or shouting, as was the child’s loud crying, on more than one occasion._

_Further interviews with Mr. Hooper after the initial were not possible. On our return to the address, we were informed that Mr. Hooper and the baby had left the previous day and no forwarding details had been left. Further investigation has revealed that the birth of their child was not registered in Chicago or the state of Illinois, and that no medical records exist for Mary or Albert Hooper or any child of such._

_In the absence of further evidence and with the detail obtained from the autopsy and witness statements, I am left to conclude that Mr. Hooper’s involvement in Mrs. Hooper’s death may have been planned. He may have harboured malicious intent towards her, possibly to the extent of restricting her liberty in the months prior to the incident, although this could also have been for her own safety as well of that of their child._

_This matter is open, pending the questioning of Albert James Hooper. I refer all interested parties to the collected statements and autopsy report presented to the coroner as of May 31st, 1956._

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For warnings and disclaimers - see chapter one

~*~

 

Ariadne had interrogated the archivist with her usual through manner, making the young woman run through every other possible hit that their search had returned, then trying to obtain any documents related to Hooper, Albert James. “By tomorrow, I promise,” the archivist had eventually concluded their business. “But I warn you, he shows only two records so if you’re looking for something in particular...”

“What are they?” Ariadne interrupted briskly.

“He registered as a voter and he also has a record of employment.”

“Is there anything for a minor child connected to either Mary or Albert?” Arthur asked. “A birth or a death certificate? A medical record maybe?”

“No.” The young woman shook her head. “There was only one associated name for Mary and that was her husband. Given that Albert only has two records it’s unlikely he has any name associated with him except his wife or his boss. I’m sorry.” She smiled ruefully with a shake of her head.

 

They scanned all the documents in Mary Hooper’s file, taking copies for good measure. Arthur stood over the whirring copier machine as he watched it smoothly consume and spit out the papers, the faint squeaks and thumps of it working a counterpoint to the possibilities blurring in his mind. Could Mallorie have run away because she had discovered she was pregnant? Was that why Miles and Cobb had argued before he left for Georgia? If that was true, was the baby Dominick Cobb’s, or had William Eames hidden something more base from them? Who the hell was Albert Hooper and where had he gone with the baby? And why had Mallorie’s death been re-registered in California?

 

More questions, no answers. Arthur watched Ariadne feeding papers through the desktop scanner, her bent head and curtain of hair hiding her penetrating eyes as she worked, but he knew she was looking, and questioning just as keenly as he was.

 

* * *

Mallorie’s Californian death certificate and autopsy arrived by email attachment the next day. They took it, the registered voter and employee record for Albert Hooper and every other scrap of evidence they had and carried it from their hotel, where they’d been chasing the evidence around in circles since breakfast, to an Italian restaurant where they had booked a table for six. (Arthur flippantly saying it could seat Cobb, Mal, Molly, the baby and Albert.) The proprietor had barely batted an eyelash as they sat in the back and unpacked everything meticulously then settled down to a meal of spaghetti and meatballs, salad and bread. “Just like Lady and The Tramp,” Ariadne said cheerfully.

“Does that make me the tramp?” Arthur twirled his spaghetti on his fork as he stared at the dishes in front of them. “There is so much here. Do we look hungry?”

“We’ve not eaten this well since Antibes,” Ariadne agreed. “I’m never going to finish this.”

“Perhaps they think we’ll be off solids after reading two autopsies in as many days.” Arthur slurped a spaghetti strand into his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of water, refusing to make any connection between the colour of the sauce and the colour that black and white film had mercifully spared them. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said for what felt like the twenty thousandth time that day. “The autopsies are the same except for the details indicating that she’d given birth. They even mention the same injury to her left leg.”

 

Ariadne closed her eyes and sighed. “They both died by falling. There are bound to be consistencies in the injuries they had. Plus breaking a leg in childhood isn’t unusual.”

“They both resemble Mallorie Miles,” Arthur pushed. “Even you admitted that.”

“The photos are black and white, showing someone with facial injuries. They both have the same hair style and apparently the same colour, but —” she held up a warning hand “— that could have been a fashionable look and more common than you’re imagining. They do look alike, but then the basis for comparison isn’t that big.”

“Do you not want it to be Mallorie?”

She looked back at Arthur in surprise. “Why do you say that?”

“You don’t seem to want to embrace the possibility that she could be.”

“Arthur.” Ariadne folded her hands on the table. “I want to know what happened just as badly as you but I won’t let us reach the wrong conclusion by forcing it to be there.”

 

“Try it my way for a minute: let’s say she is.” Arthur leant forwards. “Lets work on the basis that these two similar women are the same person for a moment. Why would she die in one city, be autopsied there and supposedly removed for disposal, only to be declared dead eleven days later in another state, given another autopsy and buried? What would need to happen if she was the same person?”

“Fine. Well, who claimed her body in Chicago?” Ariadne asked, reaching for Mary Hooper’s papers. “It says Richard Vaughn, funeral home director. Albert Hooper is listed as her spouse but we know he left the city shortly after her death. He could have identified her as Mary Hooper then someone,” she paused for effect, “would have to claim the body, transport it to the Miles’ property, stage the accident, have a doctor declare her dead and someone identify her as Mallorie, autopsy her again making them expunge certain details, then bury her as Mal.”

 

Arthur tapped the table. “Stephen was the one who found Mallorie,” he said slowly. “Everyone who knows about her accident says three things: that she fell from the loft in one of the outbuildings, that Stephen found her, and that the casket was closed at her memorial because she was so badly hurt.”

“So Stephen was the one who orchestrated this entire drama?” Ariadne waved her hands over the amassed papers. “How did he manage to have them leave out the details of her being post-partum?”

“The Chrysalis Project and the science were classified until 1977, military secret and for their use only.”

 

Ariadne groaned. “No, Arthur, not a conspiracy theory. What on earth could they gain from disguising a suicide as an accident and a nursing mother as a — ” She stopped suddenly and her face went blank for a second. “Suicide as an accident...” she said softly.

“What?” Arthur looked at her. “What?”

“Where is Mallorie Miles buried?” Ariadne scrabbled at the papers, desperately turning them over.

“A cemetery near Berkeley.”

“Consecrated ground?” Ariadne said asked abruptly.

“Yes,” Arthur said. “The family were Catholic.” He stopped as the thought completed “You think it’s that simple? A ruse to give her a proper burial and negate a mortal sin?”

“Two mortal sins,” Ariadne pointed out. “Sex outside marriage and suicide.”

 

“So Mallorie runs away from home, pregnant. She goes to Chicago and has the baby while living with a man called Albert Hooper. She gives birth, possibly has post-natal depression, commits suicide leaving the baby with Albert Hooper. Someone tells Stephen who manages to reclaim her body, stage the accident and alter her autopsy record so she can be buried on holy ground. God, we sound crazier by the minute.” Arthur said, putting his chin on his hand. “Tell me, what happened to Cobb after June 1956?”

Ariadne shrugged. “He was supposed to have left the Chrysalis Project after finishing training the first military groups to use the PASIV. He was at Fort Benning until June 1956.”

“Mallorie’s death certificate says she died on June first 1956.” Arthur glanced down at it. “Then what?”

“He took a break for a year, he lived on the Pacific coast and didn’t do anything as far as his notes showed. Then he taught at Cornell for three months before he went into practice in LA for four years; he gradually worked less and less after 1970 then in 1975 he sent his notebooks to Paris, left LA and just vanished. No one saw him again and no one much seemed to care. He was an only child, his parents died when he was a teenager, he didn’t seem to inspire much friendship and that was that. No one reported him missing and there’s never been any body found so —” she opened her hands “— the end.”

 

“He was listed at Fort Benning for the period Mallorie would have been in Chicago, right?” Arthur picked at his salad. “But we don’t have any sources placing him there except that listing as a civilian staff member.”

“So that’s a falsified autopsy, a falsified death certificate and a falsified military record.” Ariadne ticked them off on her fingers. “Why would Stephen falsify a record for Cobb? They argued, Eames and Yusuf’s memories showed that, and Miles sent him back to Fort Benning. The last few letters could just as easily be falsified or fanciful on Cobb and Mallorie’s parts, which is why they don’t conclusively prove Cobb was living with her or that he was calling himself Albert Hooper and posing as her husband. More importantly, how and why would anyone go to so much trouble to create such an enormous official deception?” Ariadne’s hot amber eyes latched on to his, the passion of her words reflected in her expression. She never looked away, Arthur realised, she would go on long past most people’s point of comfort, except he never seemed to feel the pang of her holding him like that anymore.

 

“I don’t know,” he admitted and broke off, looking down at the food still spread in front of them. “I can’t eat or think about this at the moment. Shall we get out of here?”

“It sounds like we’re playing hooky.” She half smiled at him.

“We are.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. ”Come on, let’s pack this up and take a walk. They’ve waited half a century for us. What harm can another day do?” Ariadne hesitated, looking at the work next to them almost guiltily. “I’ve never been to Chicago before and I’d like to look around,” he added, raising his eyebrows and trying to look innocent. “Did you know that Chicago was rated the most beautiful city in the world using a scoring system including architectural significance and innovative design?”

She looked at him with a complicated expression of amusement meeting incredulity then laughed to herself as she shook her head. “You shouldn’t be allowed near Google or Wikipedia if you’re going to put them to such nefarious use.”

“The first rule of winning a fencing match.” He pushed his plate away and grinned at her. “Know your opponent.”

“And the second?”

“Strategy is everything. Coming?” he asked airily, starting to pile up their work. “Cloud Gate is supposed to be amazing and it isn’t that far from here.”

 

Ariadne tried to bite back another smile and failed. “With the understanding we should be working — yes, I’d love to.” She held out her hands for the papers he’d gathered and as he reached across their fingers tangled in the transfer. Her touch was warm, slim digits slotting around his, not pulling away as they took hold.

 

* * *

An afternoon turned into a day, then two, then before he knew it a week of city walks, museum visits and shared meals. They even ran together two or three times, her endurance managing to pace to his longer stride as they circled Grant Park. He found the peace that had always come from the intense exercise was uninterrupted by her presence, as if she and he could exist in the same space and be perfectly separate at once.

 

Ariadne would finish each breakfast by protesting that they should be researching, then Arthur would concede before saying another half day couldn’t hurt them. It wasn’t as if they weren’t working, he would reason back, they were discussing theories and trying to clarify lines of enquiry. “Creating cognitive dissonance is an excellent technique for opening new lines of thought,” he declared over coffee on the third day, watching Ariadne hoist her eyebrows to her hairline.

 

“Really? That sounds like the kind of bullshit you’d use to justify being caught playing online Scrabble by your department head.”

“Who says it wasn’t?” He tapped his spoon on the rim of his cup and sipped innocently.

“That sounds like the voice of experience,” she said with a small smile. “What else lurks in your dark past?”

“I assure you, any and all rumours of my dark past have been greatly exaggerated. But you can call me if you ever need an escape route when they catch up with you.”

“Careful, I might hold you to that.”

“It would be an honour to psychobabble on your behalf.” He bowed his head, peeking up at her as she watched him.

 

* * *

“I was thinking that we should talk to Michael Cobol Junior in Berkeley.” Arthur gestured for the waiter as he spoke. “See if he could shed some light on things. Would you like coffee or some brandy?”

Ariadne nodded, waiting until they were alone again before she replied.

 

“Are you still convinced that this entire scenario is linked to the military origins of the Chrysalis Project?” She propped her head on one hand, regarding him at an angle.

“At the moment it’s all that seems to make sense. Call me Fox Mulder if you want —” Ariadne rolled her eyes good-naturedly “— but Stephen Miles by himself doesn’t seem like the kind of man who could fool a doctor, a coroner, and a military base commander all at once.”

“If we assume Cobb’s record at Fort Benning is false, Mulder.”

“Well, Scully, if anyone can tell us it would be Michael Cobol. His father was the project coordinator. If Miles could get any kind of leverage over state officialdom it would most likely have come from him, right?”

Arthur picked up his brandy snifter and sipped, enjoying the smoke and caramel flavour fanning across his tongue as Ariadne watched him, twirling the liquid in her glass.

 

“He would, I agree.” She tasted her own drink then said with a soft smile. “I used to want red hair when I was younger. I thought brown was boring.” She added when he made a confused face, “You called me Scully.”

“Really? I’ve never thought brunettes were boring.” He let the warm alcohol in his system loosen his tongue and make him bold. “Certainly not you, doctor.” She put her glass down and leant forward a fraction, her smile wide as she made to parry, neatly as anyone he’d ever faced in a match.

“My feelings exactly.”

 

Arthur felt his eyes go wide: was she saying—? His brain jammed behind the realisation and stopped just when it most needed not to. She held on to his slightly startled look for a beat then broke off suddenly, leaving him wondering if she’d meant to flirt at all.

 

”So tell me, when do we leave for the very plausible state of California?” Her voice was firm again.

“The day after tomorrow, I thought.” Arthur followed her lead. “Unless you’d like to stay a little longer?”

“No, no, that’s fine.” Ariadne drained her coffee cup and reached for her purse. “We should get back to working.” Arthur opened his mouth to reply, watching her shift back into her academic mode and finding himself wishing he could bring back the warm smile of before.

 

* * *

“Well, that explains Stephen Miles if nothing else.”

 

Michael Cobol rested his hands on his stomach as he sat back behind the desk in his home office, looking from Arthur to Ariadne and back again. He had finished reading the collected information they’d presented him with and now was making a rueful face at them.

 

“What does, sir?” Ariadne jumped in. “Is any of this familiar?”

“My father told me once he had very few regrets in his life.” Michael paused and smiled to himself. “He was a career soldier and used to sacrifice. That’s the reason I never joined up in his footsteps you know. I wanted to see my kids grow up, not be some guy called Dad who showed up once in a while with a bag of presents. I resented him for the longest time for being that man, as I told you before.” He nodded to Arthur. “Just before he died he said there were only three times he wished he could change: seeing me and my brother born, and saying yes to Stephen Miles.”

“What did he say yes to? Do you know?” Ariadne pushed far more politely than Arthur felt he could manage at that point. He was strongly quelling the urge to grab Michael’s shoulder and shake the answer out.

 

“Stephen’s daughter —”

“Mallorie,” Arthur corrected sharply.

“Mallorie, she got herself into some trouble. She ran off to Chicago and ended up throwing herself out of a window or off a building or something like that. One of the men from the project — Dominick Cobb?”

“We know him,” Ariadne prompted. “Go on, please.”

“Dominick Cobb contacted Stephen and told him she’d had an accident, was living under this assumed name and made a terrible mess of things, could Stephen help? So Stephen came to my father and they —” he made a face “— they fixed it.”

 

“Fixed it?” Arthur demanded. “Fixed what? When I interviewed you you made no mention of anything like this. How could you leave something so vital —”

 

Ariadne shot him a sharp glance that shut his mouth.

“Please, continue.” She nodded.

 

“I’m sorry, Doctor Moss, but I felt at the time that it really wasn’t my place to tell you. This was personal, about their family. They wanted her buried here, but she’d died there and there was an investigation, it looked really bad and Stephen seemed to think they’d never give her a proper place to lie if they didn’t change things so....well...”

 

“Did your father happen to mention if he’d made any records of this?” Ariadne was crisp. “A diary, any letters or notes between himself and Stephen?”

Michael shook his head. “No.”

“Do you have any idea why he might have done this at Stephen’s request? It could be construed as an abuse of his position after all.”

“Well, if you’re asking me to justify it? I didn’t really know before, but now I might.” Micheal touched the letters. “If they were playing around with the PASIV, carrying on under her daddy’s nose, like this says, then she ran off and died. She was her daddy’s assistant and she probably knew as much as he did to boot. Any link to her death being suicide and the project would have dropped a railroad sleeper straight over their work. Can you imagine? So I guess he used it as an excuse to protect them all, let them keep going, as well as keeping Miles happy and cooperative.”

“Sir, I really must insist — are you saying that your father helped falsify a death certificate and an autopsy record for Mallorie Miles?” Ariadne’s tone was hardening.

“I am, although I really only have his word on that. He was an old man when he told me, Doctor Portier, but he never gave me a reason to doubt him. He said he fixed it up and saw that nothing met the light of day. Miles’ girl had her grave and Dominick Cobb went free. My father said that wasn’t right, but he did it anyway. Miles said he had to be allowed, and so they let him.”

 

“Sorry,” Arthur interrupted. “Your father thought Cobb was implicated in Mal’s death?”

“I think so. He just said it wasn’t right that the man should have been made to go.”

 

“Was there any mention of Mallorie marrying or having had a child while she lived in Chicago?” Ariadne steered the conversation back.

“No.”

“You never asked your father if he did anything else to dissociate her death from any mention of something that would make her unsuitable for Christian burial?” Arthur snapped.

“No. It broke his heart to talk about it, you have to understand. My father fought in Europe and Korea and he talked about that far more easily than he did about this. I would no more have made him talk than put him on the rack.” Michael gazed over their heads. “You don’t make a man relive something like that if he can’t bear to look it in the face. I was never as hard or willing to sacrifice as him, Doctor Moss. I loved my father. So I let it be.”

 

* * *

St. Joseph’s cemetery was a small park stranded between the suburbs of Rollingwood and San Pablo and the dirty grey of the Eastshore freeway. Arthur had driven them there in silence, feeling Ariadne wanting to speak and somehow unable to find a way to start to talk.

 

It wasn’t until they were standing by Mallorie’s grave marker that she spoke.

 

“You were right.” She touched his arm, lightly as if she was playing tag with cobwebs, adding when he looked at her, “Mulder.”

“Yeah.” Arthur knelt down and touched the flat pane of black stone, the letters sharp under his fingers: _Mallorie Ann Miles, beloved daughter, rest in peace_. “So were you, Ariadne. Not that we can prove a fucking thing, of course.”

“We could dream with Michael Cobol,” she said doubtfully. “Ask him to recall the conversation he had with his father so we can record it.” Arthur raised his head and saw her watching him in a way that was now familiar, keen eyed and almost smiling. Her shirt billowed in the spring breeze, the sheer pale fabric catching at her wrists and waist as it hinted at her dark tank top underneath; her skin breathing, her hair loose and bright in the sun. She held out her hand as if to help him up from the ground and suddenly it was as if she had resolved in his head, all her little pieces falling into place so he could see her properly, a shock as hard as falling from a roof top or a brain being fired with electrochemical pulses. “ _Love comes unsuspecting_ ,” he heard Eames say as she looked back at him, and his throat went tight as he reached out to accept her offer.

 

“Ariadne, I — ”

 

“Excuse me,” a rusty voice interrupted. They both jumped, Ariadne turning right round to find they were being watched by an elderly man, his hair thin and his skin weathered into a ruddy tan as he stooped, squinting in the sunlight. He was holding a small bunch of red roses and something clutched in his other hand, like a ball. He hesitated, then coughed. “Can I get by here?”

Ariadne stepped aside, murmuring an apology. The old man eyed them both then moved forwards stiffly and laid the flowers across Mallorie’s headstone. He mumbled something under his breath and swiped at it with his fingertips. Arthur realised he was still kneeling on the ground, staring when the man lifted his head and grumbled, “Would you give me a little privacy, son?”

 

“Sure, sorry.” Arthur gathered himself up and stepped back, taking Ariadne with him.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she added politely.

“What’s that?” The age weathered eyes narrowed.

“Stephen Miles.” Ariadne gestured to the fresh headstone atop the next grave.

 

The old man coughed again. “Well, he tried his best. Can’t say more than that about a man, can you? Old fools, the lot of us,” he said, half to himself, and put the pale orange and gold ball down next to the roses with a soft smile and turned away, shuffling back across the grass. Arthur watched him go, the bent back and wispy hair. Who would remember Mallorie now, he wondered, just as Ariadne said his name sharply.

 

She was kneeling on the ground by Mallorie’s grave, in one hand a scrap of a note and in the other the ball. _“‘I hope that you are walking the worlds beyond number, waiting for me’,_ ” she read, then held out the object in her hand. “It’s a peach.”

“You think?”

“Yes,” she said.

 

He didn’t hesitate. He turned back towards the retreating figure and ran.

 

* * *

Ariadne sat next to him on the worn leather couch as if she’d been turned to stone and made mute. She had barely spoken on the drive to the small, dark timber house built on the shore, coming inside and sitting down without comment even as her eyes had darted around, taking in the books, the pictures and the furniture. Her hands had shaken so violently when their host had given her a cup of tea that Arthur had had to take it from her immediately in case she got scolded, putting a soothing hand on hers until she put them back in her lap. Now she was just staring at the old man in the lounge chair in front of her as if there were too many questions in her head to pick just one that she might start with.

 

“Ariadne,” their host said warmly, his voice splitting the syllables into an accented pronunciation unlike any Arthur had heard. “My keenest student. It’s good to meet you finally.”

“I — you— you’ve read my book?” She boggled.

He reached up to the higgledy piggledy book case behind him, making a small noise of effort and pulled down a well thumbed volume spiky with bookmarks. “ _‘Dreaming Spires: The Architectural Influence of Dominick Cobb’_ ,” he smiled as he read aloud. “Why me? There are so many other men you could have chosen. Richard Rodgers, Phillip Johnson.” He peered at her. “I built four structures in life. That’s nothing.”

“But in dreams you were unsurpassed,” she said. “You created things that will go on being seen and used for years to come. They’ll never erode or be altered by another architect. Your vision is what makes shared dreaming work.”

 

“I would hardly say that.” He put the book down in his lap. “I suspect Arthur feels the same, don’t you, son?”

Arthur caught Dom Cobb’s look at him and went to qualify himself.

“You were certainly pivotal,” he started, “But you didn’t work in isolation. And please don’t call me son. Sir.”

“I like that,” Cobb remarked dryly. “We’d have worked well together in the right time and place, you and I. I expect even Eames liked you and he’s more suspicious than a college den mother. You’re just like your work suggests you are. You call it like you see it. Yes, I’ve read your work too, what precious little you’ve published so far —” he jabbed a finger in Arthur’s direction “— and so have all the rest of them if I’m any judge, even Robert. We don’t get less vain as we get older, we get more.”

 

“Did you know we were here?” Ariadne asked suddenly. “Did Michael Cobol tell you?”

“Everyone in the world who knew I was alive is dead now, Ariadne. You and Arthur were lucky. Another day or another hour and we wouldn’t be talking like this.”

“Who did know you were alive?” She was suddenly animated, as if the fear and wonder had fallen off her. “Why did you disappear? What happened in Chicago? Did you —”

 

“I can tell you,” Cobb said mildly, putting a stop to her stream of words, “Or I can show you. Which do you prefer? You have a PASIV, I take it?”

 

Arthur looked at Ariadne, feeling her twitch of alarm at his guess. “We do, but there is a risk inherent for someone of your age and I —”

 

Cobb waved him off.

“I accept that. Surely you want to know what we found, Mal and I?” He sounded seductive, and Arthur felt a cold arrow down his spine.

“A dream within a dream,” he guessed.

Cobb lent forward, resting his arms on his thighs. “Something better,” he whispered. “Come and see.”

 

Arthur hesitated, caution making him edgy. Something about this was making all his senses alert and even if he wanted to know he really should exercise a little caution on both their behalves. “I think we both appreciate the offer, but we’d like some time to...”

“No.” Cobb shook his head. “Now or never.”

 

* * *

 

Arthur stopped in the cool, dark hallway of the small house, catching Ariadne’s hand in his. “You don’t have to come,” he insisted softly, leaning close to her. “Stay up here, watch the PASIV for me.”

“Why would I not want to come into his dream? He’s been my work for all my academic career.” She searched his expression. “He’s disturbed you. What do you think he knows? Do you think he killed Mallorie or that he’s dangerous?”

“I don’t know.” Arthur shook his head, unable to stop himself from looking at her pale face, so bright and lovely in the dimness. “With layered dreams, it’s an unknown quantity. Double given his level of ability. Anything could happen, a dream collapse or worse. I just want you to understand that this could be dangerous and one of us lost is bad, but both of us would be unforgivable.”

“I do understand. I want to go. You’ll have my back, right?” she said seriously.

“Yes, of course.” He took her in again, weighing up all the risks of what lay ahead, where he might end up or what he might regret — then threw them all aside and ran at what he wanted, consequences be damned.

 

“Quick, give me kiss.” 

Ariadne didn’t hesitate. Her body turned and her mouth touched his, too slow to be a peck, too fast to be a passionate embrace. She tasted of tea with milk and her fingers curled around his as she took the PASIV handle with him. Her scent was bordering on aggressive, until it softened and opened out into its sappy, damp depths tinged with sweetness that could only be the base note of her skin. She was in every one of his senses at once and it made everything in him press towards her, desperate for just a fraction more.

 

“What was that for?” she asked as she pulled away. ”Luck?”

 

Arthur raised one eyebrow and tried to sound suave. “I thought it was worth a shot.” She coloured, her lips parted as she blinked at him, probably in disbelief.  “Come on, we should get in there,” he said, moving away from her but not quite missing her smile to herself from the corner of his eye. She was doubtless calling him a son of a bitch or something equally flattering for that, but he didn’t care. After all, he thought, even condemned men get a last request.

 

* * *

Cobb took the offered lead with a calm, steady hand.

 

“Has it been long since your last shared dream?” Arthur asked as he freed the spool for him.

“Long enough,” he replied as he exposed the needles. “But not so long I’ve forgotten how.” He settled back into his lounge chair with a small sigh, closing his eyes as he relaxed and fastened the cuff.

 

Ariadne held out her wrist to him as he knelt by her knees, swabbing the site and focusing totally on the task in hand lest he stop and demand that they reconsider the entire idea of dreaming like this with someone like Cobb. “I’m going to be the dreamer. Stay close to me,” he said quietly as he inserted the needles. “If anything happens then I’ll try and take care of it.” Ariadne wriggled her fingers and then moved to lay down, folding her arm over her stomach.

“I know him. He isn’t going to deliberately hurt us,” she replied calmly, trying to reassure him, he had no doubt. Arthur looked up at her, her warm brown eyes as sharp as ever as she looked into him.

“I hope you’re right.” He took his own lead and sat down on the floor next to her, setting his line and cuing the player. He took one more look at her, taking her nod as the signal.

 

“Ready?” he asked Cobb.

 

“Go,” he said shortly.

 

* * *

 

When Arthur opened his eyes he saw instantly that, deliberately or not, the more experienced dreamer among them was pulling the fabric of it in to his own shapes. The landscape of Cobb’s dream wasn’t as Arthur had intended at all: the park grew wild and dense like a jungle, a shifting mass of living, breathing green that made everything around them ripple and change as if reflected in water — not the neatly manicured meadow bordered by tall houses that Arthur had tried to shape.

 

Cobb himself was standing with his back to them, dressed in a dark blue shirt and grey pants. He was bowed, but as he turned there was a shift, another of those ripples and Arthur saw him change: his hair becoming dark blond, the lines of his face sharpening and drawing back to leave him a strong nose and jaw, blue eyes that reminded him just fractionally of Ariadne’s intense stare, and a close cut beard. His body straightened and thinned, his skin smoothed out, and then he was there, the man they both knew.

 

“Welcome,” he said to Ariadne. “This is the one place in the world where people like you and I can be truly free to express ourselves.” He held out his hand to her, making Arthur want to drag her behind the shield of his body in an irrational response. She stepped forward calmly.

“What do you mean?”

“We can make things that can never be or will be. We can make whole new worlds. What Mal and I found was that the worlds we can make are infinite, just as we thought. We came here —” he gestured around him “— and we found this.” He pointed downwards and there at his feet was a PASIV, the lid raised and three leads lying on the ground. “It’s such a simple idea, after all we had thought it might take. How do you dream within a dream? Just like you dream in the first place.” He smiled.

 

“You projected the PASIV?” Arthur asked. "You made it manifest?"

“Mal did it first. She took a risk and tested the Somnacin variant on herself, but that was her all over. She’d rather know than tie herself in knots waiting to check it was safe. Back then the sedative blend wasn’t as good as it is now, far too heavy handed and easy to over or underdose on an addictive substance, but now...well. Everything is a lot more refined. So you see. Shall we?” he asked, looking at them with a serious expression and watching as Arthur hesitated again, trying to judge what he should do. This was new ground and he was a researcher: he wanted to go forwards even if a more sensible and mature part of him was screaming that he should do this properly, the way he had been taught to handle whackjobs in the dream state.

 

Ariadne turned back to him, and for a fraction of a second he hesitated. But he had to know and so far Cobb had posed no open threat.

“Come on. The only way is to see.” Cobb knelt by the case and held out a lead.

“I’m going to be the dreamer,” Arthur insisted as he took the line and motioned for Ariadne’s. “You let me make the shape of the dream we go into, understand?”

“Of course.” Cobb watched as he wired in Ariadne again, then himself. “Are you ready, son?”

“We are,” Ariadne said firmly as she settled on the grass, her expression barely betraying her excitement. Arthur closed his eyes, took three deep breaths as the piston hissed _and —_

 

* * *

The city was huge and empty, towers of glass, metal and stone jagged against the sky. He was standing at an intersection, looking back towards the road as it climbed up hill and away from him. His vision blurred for a second, then cleared sharply as he turned back to find Ariadne at his shoulder, gazing around her.

 

“Chicago,” she said quietly. “Did you mean to do this?”

“No,” Cobb spoke before Arthur could. “I apologise, but you wanted to know what happened here so I thought this would be easier.”

“You asshole,” Arthur spat, the annoyance suddenly overwhelming his awe. “You agreed.”

“I did, but I changed my mind. Calm down. One apology is all you’re going to get,” Cobb dismissed him shortly. “What do you think then? A dream within a dream, the holy grail.”

 

“What’s the point?” Ariadne asked, breaking off from looking around her.

“Arthur?” Cobb prompted him like a teacher, making him want to snarl.

“The idea is that the further down you go the deeper into the unconscious you travel,” he said, directing himself to Ariadne. “You could uncover deeper traumas or plant more healthy suggestions in the patient’s mind. But it was dismissed as an impossibility because it could increase the chances of a dream collapse and no one could ever find a reliable way to make the subject and the dreamer enter the state at the same time.”

 

“Poor Robert,” Cobb said. “He never enjoyed shared dreams like the rest of us. He was useful when Miles wanted to discredit the idea, since he was so overwhelmingly negative about the limited experiments they did do.”

“Why did Miles want the idea discredited?” Arthur rounded on Cobb. “If this is so safe and simple, why did it never become common practice? If you managed this one of you must have told him about the technique. Are you expecting me to believe that he suppressed your work out of spite?”

“You’re almost right.” Cobb sighed and motioned with his head. “Come with me. You wanted to know what happened here, didn’t you?” he threw back over his shoulder.

 

Ariadne set off after him, leaving Arthur to hurry into the rear. Something about this was making his skin crawl, but he wasn’t able to determine why and it was putting him on an even finer edge. Cobb was leading them by the noses, sure, but that wasn’t all. He was holding something back even as he apparently handed them the biggest prize of all, teasing and hinting like he was the fucking Wizard of Oz.

 

Cobb led them down the street, then turned a sharp left suddenly, mounting a flight of steps in front of a tall building. He held the door for them as they entered then walked more sedately up the stairs, fourteen short flights by Arthur’s count, down the murky hall and opened a dark green door marked 7B.

 

“A dumbbell tenement,” he said as they went inside. The main room was graced with a broad window, it being square and furnished with some brightly patterned rugs, a dark blue threadbare couch and a table and pair of chairs. Someone had put some dark purple wildflowers in a vase and a few pictures hung on the walls, but it was hard to hide the fact the paint was a dirty cream and the dark brown linoleum on the floor peeling at the corners. “Small, cozy.” There was a patter of footsteps and suddenly Mallorie darted into the room, flinging herself at Cobb with a grin, the yellow dress she was wearing sunny as her looks. “Home,” he said wrapping his arms around her waist as she kissed him.

“I missed you today,” she said.

“I missed you too. How are my two most precious people in the world?” he said seriously.

 

Arthur felt Ariadne edge closer to him. “What’s happening here?” she demanded.

“Mal’s pregnant.” Cobb didn’t look away from the woman he was holding. “We were lovers. We became lovers,” he corrected himself as he put her down. “We dreamt a dream so deep that we lived a hundred lives and when we came back —” he touched her face with the back of his fingers “— we needed to know we were real again. Flesh and blood. So we made love.” He said it as if it was the most logical thing in the world.

“We did.” Mallorie reached out and touched him. “We became two halves of the same whole in every way we could.”

 

The scene shifted, and Mallorie was sitting on the couch in a blue skirt and sweater, her stomach huge as it ballooned from under her ribs. “Husband!” she called, beaming as Cobb went to her side. “He’s kicking. Feel.”

“You were Albert Hooper?” Arthur said as Cobb pressed his hand to Mal’s belly and kissed the end of her nose.

“Of course. I walked out of Fort Benning when Mallorie told me that she’d told Miles everything and was leaving home. I went back to California but Miles sent me packing. He refused to listen to anything, called us irresponsible, stupid, careless, anything he could think of really. So I came to Chicago because you told me this was where you were.”

“I left you a message,” Mallorie said gaily. “Fort Benning guard post. So you came to be with me.”

“She’s huge.” Arthur stared at Mal’s shape. “How pregnant is she?”

 

“Six months,” Mallorie replied, turning to look at Arthur. “Hello. You’re the man who wants to know everything about us.” Her eyes were deep blue and her smile pretty as any he’d seen, except she was a projection and no projection he’d ever encountered had ever looked at him so hungrily, a sharp edge under the softness. “And you’re the girl with the all the questions.”

He saw Ariadne flinch back as Mallorie looked at her. “What’s she talking about? Cobb?”

 

“You asked what the point of this was. Why bother making dreams within dreams?” he replied, standing as the room blurred and refocused. Mallorie was standing in the middle of the floor, both hands on her stomach and her face was tear stained.

 

“I saw them,” she insisted in a raw voice. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“I do.” Cobb wiped her face with his thumbs. “But it was the dream. This is real. This is now.”

“It wasn’t,” Mallorie shouted. “I know what’s real! That was real! They were real!”

“Mal, please,” he said with contained force, “This is real. I am real. What you saw was something we dreamt. Those children weren’t ours.”

 

“What’s wrong with her?” Ariadne came forwards as Mallorie wept again.

“I started to dream,” she sobbed. “I saw the dreams we had had together.” She looked up from her hands at Cobb, who Arthur could see was staring at her, his expression hopeless and pained. “I saw the family we had, the houses we lived in, the things I did and we discovered. We started to realise then that it isn’t just the dream you make. It can creep inside your head and make you. I knew we were going to have twins. A girl and a boy,” she said sadly. “I knew even then. I knew because I’d seen it in the dream.”

 

The scene moved again, before anyone could speak. Mallorie was sitting on the couch again, a small bundle in each arm, singing as she looked down at each little face. Arthur watched Cobb as he sat down next to her, drew her into his arms and rocked all three of them. “Phillipa,” she said gently, “and James. See? What did I tell you?”

 

Arthur stopped Ariadne from speaking with a touch on her arm. “No. She’s not like any projection I’ve ever seen before. Say it carefully.”

 

“Cobb.” Ariadne spoke as gently as Arthur had ever heard her. “Cobb, what happened? Did Mal hurt one of them?”

“No,” he said with a strange smile. “She loved them. We both did. But it was a lot, twins. One cries, the other cries. One needs food, the other needs food. One needs changing, the other needs it too. She tried, she tried so hard.” He kissed the side of Mal’s head as she cooed.

“The statements say there was only one child.”

“We were trying to stay out of sight. People would have remembered twins, so we thought it would be simpler to pretend that there was just one baby. It sounds so stupid now, but it felt like the right thing to do then. We were so sure we would be found, that Miles would take her home, we would have done anything. But she wasn’t herself any more. She slept and dreamed and when she woke up reality was her dream. I started asking myself what I could have done to make her well, here or in the dreams. Was it my fault?” He looked at Arthur desperately, hanging onto Mallorie and his children so hard she wriggled uncomfortably.

“What did you do?” Arthur asked in a low voice, deliberately slow and even.

“I didn’t mean —” Cobb’s face contorted.

 

“He told me that my life wasn’t real.” Mallorie kissed one baby then the other. “Such a small thing, you would think. Such a tiny set of words to send someone to their death.”

“He told you that here?” Arthur addressed Mallorie as carefully as he’d spoken to Cobb.

She looked at him, her face pitying as she smiled back and shook her head. “Do you think this is all we found? This dream inside another?” She looked at Ariadne, who was reaching out to grab Arthur’s hand. “Do you?” Arthur swallowed, the sting of acid in his throat making it hard to speak.

“It wasn’t?”

“We touched infinity, little boy,” Mallorie said sadly. “We found the universe and it was within us, not without.”

 

 

“Ariadne, stay very still,” Arthur cautioned as Mallorie stood up and came towards them.

 

 

“Hush now, little one.” She bounced one of the babies in her arms as she drew closer. “We were immortal, and it was perfect. Why would anyone want to leave that behind?”

“It wasn’t real,” Ariadne said in disbelief. “None of this is real. You can’t live forever or make a universe. You can’t.”

 

 

“You can,” Cobb said dully. “You can go into the mind as far as it will let you. That was what we did. We went past the dreams and into the space where they come from.”

 

“Would you like to see?” Mallorie asked.

 

“No.” Arthur forced himself to concentrate in spite of the sickening fear yawning open around him, gripped around the shape in his mind, brought his hand up, and touched his sword against Mal’s chest. “We want to leave.”

Her smile split wide as she looked at the blade, showing her teeth. “Sorry, but that isn’t going to be possible.”

Her arms dropped suddenly to her sides in a blur of white cloth unravelling. He recoiled in shock, expecting to see two small bodies sprawling into thin air, but instead bright metal glinted in Mal’s open hands. Arthur went to react, but she was faster: she pressed forwards and slashed. The pain in his abdomen was hot as Arthur grabbed his hand to it, the sword falling to his feet, sticky droplets of blood and slippery tissue urging between his fingers.

“Ariadne,” he choked as his knees buckled. “What the fuck have you done?” he asked Mallorie as she hovered over him, watching her change into Cobb. He grabbed on to Ariadne’s hand, hearing her groan and try to speak.

 

“We’re showing you the only way we can,” Cobb said gently, kneeling down next to them. “Don’t fight it. Let it go.”

 

Arthur blinked, feeling the world leech into agony. Ariadne was cursing Cobb in fragile bursts, squeezing Arthur’s hand and trying to breathe, the air in her lungs loud even as he was aware of things fading around him. He pulled himself towards her in a last attempt to do as he’d promised, dragging her into the curve of his body.

 

“I’m cold,” she breathed as her fingers gripped his arms, leaving tacky marks of drying blood. She was smaller than him so she’d bleed out faster, which would be one small mercy. “Are we going to die?” she asked with horrific calm.

“In a normal dream if you die you wake up.”

“This isn’t a normal dream.” She started to shiver convulsively. “I can’t feel my legs, Arthur.” He tried to press his hands into her stomach wound but he was weakening too, his flesh getting colder as his blood pooled around them. He tried to think desperately of some comfort or some way to reassure her that this death was as false as anything else in the dream, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know if the illusion of dying could be made strong enough here to kill the dreamer, especially after seeing how Mallorie behaved. He could lie, try to send Ariadne away in peace, but the thought of deceiving her especially now made him despise himself for even considering it.

 

“You’re losing blood, that’s why. It won’t be long now. It’s going to be over soon and the pain will stop.” He rolled her over to face him, cringing when she made a bitten down noise of discomfort, and grabbed both her hands as tightly as he could. “Look at me,” he insisted, watching as her eyes flickered open. “Look at me. You’re OK.” Her chest heaved as she managed a half smile. Her lips were pallid against her ashy complexion.

 

“It was an honour, Doctor Arthur Moss.”

“Ariadne, don’t you fucking dare go without me.” He was pleading now, even as he felt his own consciousness dimming. “We’re going to do this together.”

“We did.” Her words were slow and thick. “Quick, give me a kiss.”

 

Her mouth was cold this time, and he barely had time to feel her press back against him before her breathing stopped. He lay with her, feeling how small and empty her body was but unable to let it go. He let his breaths shorten, felt his awareness shrinking as if he was being pulled downwards into the dark, and hoped that if this was the end that she would be the last thing he thought of, not Cobb or Mal, work or all the things he’d never done with his life.

 

So Arthur let his eyes close. _Ariadne_ , he said to himself one last time.

 

 _Ariadne_.

 

* * *


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For warnings and disclaimer - please see chapter one

~*~

 

Floating, rolling over and over. Blood warm water spiked with salt. Dark and noisy as if he’s trapped underneath a giant heart.

 

Then the world crashes in, light and air force into his system as cold water breaks over his head and wet sand catches in his mouth and nose, the ground under him is mushy as he’s rolled over onto it, spat out on a tide as he gasps, coughs and chokes then vomits as he struggles to his hands and knees. He’s soaking wet and the air smells of ozone, salt and green decay and underneath him a line of water is dragging back and forth, making eddies around his wrists. He twists his head and looks up.

 

He’s kneeling in the ocean. Water meets the grey horizon as far as he can see and the only noise is the waves rushing in and out. He’s alone here, in this deserted place.

Or at least he thinks so, until a hand touches his back.

 

She says it so softly.

“Arthur?”

 

* * *

They sat on the sand like they had at the Cap D’Antibes, next to each other with their feet stretched out in front of them as they dripped dry, watching the sea roll in and out. Behind them a blank city scape slumped like a mouth full of rotting teeth, glass and brick crumbling into dust.

 

“Where are we?” Ariadne asked the inevitable question after a long pause.

“I don’t know,” Arthur admitted. “I don’t think we’re dead though.” He turned to look at her, her colour healthy and her body whole again. He’d felt her die, and some part of him was still furious and desperate with that knowledge even as he let himself taste the happiness of seeing her again.

 

“It felt like a real death,” she said, watching him. “Not that I ever died before, I admit. So if we’re not dead, what is this? Another dream? And where’s Cobb?”

“I’m guessing this is what they called the beach at the end of the world.” Arthur looked around them. “The one the theta groups came to and that they mentioned in their letters. Empty and blank, they all said, except this —” he looked back at the deserted city “—this is not blank. I know I’m not the dreamer for this. Are you?”

“No.” She shook her damp hair down her shoulders. “I’m not even sure if I could be, given the style and complexity of the structures. They’re mature, well integrated, evolved even. This is a finished work and it isn’t mine.”

“If this is a dream, someone has to be dreaming it. And out of all three of us, only Cobb might have been here and seen this before.”

“Which means he’s down here already. Why would he want to be here? Why would he kill us to get back?”

 

“If he was here with Mal it was the last place they were content and felt free — we know that because they said as much when they wrote to each other. I guess he wants that back, even if it’s all his projection. But I don’t know why he would kill us to bring us here with him. Unless he wants us to see it. ”

“Or see them,” she added. “He wants us to see their greatest work of all, I think.”

“Which means he’s expecting us to go and find them.” Arthur took a deep breath and cautiously let the ends of his fingers catch hold of hers. She wormed her hand around his and gripped at it hard for a second.

 

“Are you ready?” she asked. Her face was calm and her eyes clear and unwavering.

“Let’s go.” Arthur gathered himself up, turning his face towards the city and setting his mind on Dominick Cobb.

 

* * *

Ariadne walked a little ahead of him as they stepped from the soft give of the sand onto hard asphalt. A narrow street ran between two broad based towers; at it’s end a tempting light and open space hovered in the distance. He followed her towards it, watching as she glanced around them, her head tilting up to the sky to take in every detail and nuance. This was Cobb’s world, he realised, and there was no one else on earth who could have seen or appreciated it better than her. She was right, no wonder he wanted her down here. Her eyes were wide and her hands open at her sides as she went, no doubt gleaning layers of meaning from every line. By contrast he was only here as the man who studied dream science, trying to understand what had been done after the fact. He felt awe and admiration, there was no doubt about that. But he also felt that somehow Cobb was asking him to absolve him of the price that this had cost.

 

They crossed the broad plaza, empty of anything but themselves. Trees grew, but no birds sang. Escalators ran in endless loops behind glistening panes of glass, but no feet touched them. Stripes of aluminum and dark wood curved up in a jagged claw, a sculpture abandoned in the middle of a wide marble pavement. Water rippled in a reflecting pool, but all it cast back was the colour of the sky. Ariadne strode past it all without speaking and Arthur understood why. Somehow talking here felt wrong, as if the surroundings would suck the sound up before they’d even had the chance to make it. They communicated by gesture instead, by tilts of the head and touches on the arm, her eyes meeting his as a reassurance, his trying to give it back.

 

He had no idea how long they walked through the ghostly buildings, across empty shopping arcades and deserted wooden piers, past the blank blocks of apartments, and wide open public gardens with their perfect plants and polite trees. The light didn’t change; he felt neither hungry, thirsty, nor tired. Years could have passed or seconds and he would have no way of truly knowing. Was this some brain function ameliorating his sense of self and time, he wondered as they carried on. Was it that the closer they came to the source of the unconscious or just by going further in to it that it removed some of the anchors that let them determine who, what, and where they were? Did that stop being important at this depth, an irrelevance belonging to the physical world rather than one where everything was created by thought?

 

Ariadne kept walking and he carried on with her. After a while he reached out and found her hand waiting to take his and they strode onwards, down a wide walk decorated with angular metal arches that split the light into bars. Her hand was warm and strong as she wrapped her fingers around his, letting him cover her thumb with his own. _Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss_ , he remembered drowsily. She was real in this unreal world and touching her made her more so. He could have said aloud, “I’m with you.” But it would never have been a potent as this small touch.

 

They were crossing a street when they finally heard it. A small laugh, high and giddy, then slapping loose footsteps running across the pavement. Arthur turned towards the sound, and a golden ball bounced to a stop by his feet. As he bent down to touch it he felt Ariadne tug at their joined hands. Around the corner peeled a young girl, her dark blonde hair loose and curly, her dusky pink dress ruffled and short sleeved, and her shoes red as waxed apples. She ran right up to them, puffing to a halt and looking up at Arthur, pointing to the ball in his hand.

 

“Who are you?” he asked levelly, watching the small child tilt her head at the rusty sound of his voice. “Can you tell me what you want me to see?” he persisted, falling back on his training. Let the subject lead, he reminded himself.

“I’m Phillipa Mallorie Miles,” she announced proudly. “Have you come to see us, Mr. Arthur?”

“Do you want me to see you?” he asked gently. This child was obviously a projection of Cobb’s, but he recalled the name somehow, from something connected to the world above. “Do you live here?” he tried again, but before he got any answer there was a cheerful whoop and a small boy emerged, running up the street. He too was blond, but smaller, finer boned and dressed in a red, white, and green striped shirt and long shorts.

 

“Mr. Arthur and Ms. Ariadne!” he called, waving as he came up the street. “Pippa! Mommy and daddy have made tea. You have to come home now!” He reached them, grabbed his sister’s hand, and grinned up at Arthur. “James Dominick Miles, at your service. Daddy says please come now. And may we have our ball back?”

Arthur looked at Ariadne who was looking at the two children with a thoughtful crease between her eyes. “Phillipa Mallorie —” she pointed “— James Dominick. J.D. Miles. He’s Miles’ nephew?”

“Nope,” the little boy said cheerfully. “Come on. We made a cake.”

 

* * *

They followed the two scampering children back down the street, through a maze of dark, narrow alleys and sharp corners, then quite suddenly they were back in the sunshine. Grass grew under their feet, old trees grew in irregular cloud like shapes, and they were standing in front of a split level house made of dark wood. Large windows looked out on the world around them and a balcony ran the length on the building. Phillipa and James set off at a run across the lawn, pounding up the steps, calling, “They’re here!”

“Calm down now,” a warm voice said, amused, not angry, and Mallorie came out of the house. She was dressed in blue, a long cardigan over her narrow cut pants, her dark hair curling around her head in a messy halo. She kissed both children as they ran to her then urged them away. “Arthur,” she said, coming down the steps, extending her hand to him. “Ariadne, welcome.” Arthur felt himself pull back, making Ariadne step fractionally behind him. “I am sorry about what happened before,” Mallorie said with such genuine regret it sounded almost human. “It was the only way.”

“Where’s Cobb?” Ariadne said firmly. “We need to talk to him.”

 

“He’s in the house.” Mallorie gestured. “We’ve been expecting you for some time.” She led them back across the grass, up the steps, and through the screened door at the top, into an open room that was obviously an amalgam of a kitchen, dining room, and family room. Toys were scattered on the overstuffed red couch and the walls were hung with sketches and architectural drawings. A long table was set with cups, plates, a tea pot, and an iced cake topped with shiny red cherries. “Phillipa has very strong ideas about how cakes should look.” Mallorie smiled ruefully as she caught Arthur staring at it. “Please, sit down. Dom!” she called.

 

“I think we’re in Stepford,” Ariadne muttered as they sat at the table. “Tea and cake and children’s play time?”

Arthur made to reply, only to be interrupted by Dominick Cobb sweeping into the room and putting a noisy kiss on Mallorie’s mouth.

 

“We have guests!” she protested.

“They don’t mind,” he said boyishly. “Do you?”

“That depends on whether the wrong answer gets us stabbed,” Arthur shot back.

“I’m sorry, but that was the only way. I had it all under control. You suffered very little.”

 

“That was controlled? You were under control?” Arthur inhaled, refusing to grant Cobb the satisfaction of his fury and barely succeeding. “We bled to death. I watched Ariadne die in front of me.” Her hand gripped his so tightly he felt her nails in his skin. “We had no idea what would happen to us. We have no idea where we are. And I have no idea what you want from us. You want something, right?” He watched Cobb fidget with the gold band on his left ring finger.

“I wanted to use the PASIV. I did what I had to do so I could come back here.”

“Here? Where is here?” Ariadne looked around the room.

 

Cobb took a seat opposite them and poured the tea before he answered. “We called it Limbo after the realm where the unbaptised go. Neither heaven nor hell, just a void. When we came here it was empty. There was us and the beach and nothing. Space, everywhere we looked. We thought we might have died too.” Mallorie put her hand on top of Cobb’s. “Then I tried to give it a shape, like any other dream. And we made this.”

“How did you get here? Did you — did you die in a layered dream?”

 

“It was an accident,” Mallorie said softly. “We fell from a rooftop. We were experimenting with the dream inside the dream and I fell.” Cobb lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles.

 

“We were here for a very long time. Centuries maybe. We never grew old. We lived every different kind of life we could imagine. We built everything you can see, until we made this. Mal loved it, so we lived here after that. We had James and Phillipa. We did the work we had always wanted to. It was perfect.”

 

“Listen to me,” Arthur said with as much restraint as he could. “You can’t live inside dreams. They’re constructions. They can only ever be a mirror of yourself.”

“We didn’t know that then. We waited and waited for the dose to run out but it never happened. We just carried on, and the longer we were here the more she thought this was where we were meant to be.” Cobb stared at Mallorie.

 

“What did you do?” Arthur asked again, clutching Ariadne’s hand under the table.

 

“I told her that she was dreaming and she had to wake up. That her life wasn’t real, no matter what she felt about it.”

 

“And she took that conviction into the waking world.” Arthur forced his dream therapy training to take charge. “How did you wake her up, Cobb?”

 

“We killed ourselves.” Mallorie was gentle. “We took a pair of kitchen knives and cut our throats.”

“Who cut your throat?”

“Dominick did. I couldn’t do it myself. He held my head in his arms and promised me it would end quickly. He held me still and then he cut me open from artery to vein.”

 

Ariadne gasped and smothered the noise in her hand. “Tell me what happened after that, Cobb,” Arthur directed firmly, trying not to let any emotion reach his voice.

 

“We woke up,” Mallorie replied.

“Cobb, I’m asking you. You need to talk now, not Mallorie.”

“I loved her so much,” Mallorie whispered, stroking Cobb’s hair back.

“I know you did. I can see that. But I need you to talk to us,” Arthur directed. “This is your dream. Tell me why you brought us here.”

 

“Do you know how long we were asleep in the waking world? An hour. She was never the same after that.” Cobb cradled Mallorie’s cheek in his hand. “She told me she knew where we belonged and it wasn’t in the world where we were living. I thought she was just being romantic at first, saying she only wanted to be with me. But it got worse. We’d been so careful, keeping ourselves under Miles’ radar, but that night when we came here just made us so certain that our lives were with each other that we stopped caring. We slept in the same bed whenever we thought we could. We took trips that lasted for hours and brought her home late. When Miles sent me to Fort Benning he knew something was wrong, but he had no idea until Mal told him. She found out she was pregnant and she was overjoyed. The dream was coming true.” Cobb’s mouth twisted around the words. “They argued about what she should do. He told her that she’d put everything at risk, her health, the baby’s, my career, all of it because she believed that what the PASIV showed her was the truth. So she told him —” Cobb broke off.

 

“What did she say?”

 

“I told him that my life there wasn’t real.” Mallorie shook her head as she reached forward to comfort Cobb. “He was furious with me. He said I would have to go back to McLean. So I ran away as soon as I could.”

“McLean?” Ariadne asked nervously.

“It’s a mental hospital. I had a breakdown when I was eighteen. They wouldn’t call it that now; they’d say I was badly adjusted or needed to be more social and less academic. But then they put me on a ward and gave me analysis, talked about electroconvulsive therapy when I was sad and cold packs when I was angry,” Mallorie sneered. “I was allowed home in the end but with the understanding I restrict myself to more gentle work. I wanted to be a scientist. I ended up a secretary.” She let her lip curl with contempt.

 

“So you went to Chicago,” Arthur spoke directly to Cobb, trying to draw him back out.

“We were happy.” Mallorie smiled gently.

“Cobb?”

“I tried to talk to Miles, but he told me to go back to Fort Benning if I wasn’t going to tell him where Mal was. That I was a fool and she needed treatment or she would just get worse. I told him he was wrong. So I left that night and drove to Illinois with only two stops. I wanted to see her so much. To tell her how happy I was that we would be a family. I didn’t think of anything else, not how we would live or what I could do for work, I just knew I was going to be a father and that was all I cared about. Her, me, and the baby.”

“Babies,” Mallorie corrected.

“I found a job as an architect’s clerk. The pay was shitty but Mal worked at UC for a while so we got by. We would walk in the park at weekends and eat these funny little meals she’d make at night. Rice and beans with chicken. Lamb with apricots and cheese.” He half laughed. “Peach pie, every weekend. I never got sick of it. But UC asked her to leave when she got into her fifth month because she was having trouble moving around. She got put on rest by the doctor we saw, so she stayed inside a lot more. She slept a lot. I’d come home and find her sitting on the couch, saying she’d seen how our life was going to be. That it would be OK and we’d have everything we wanted soon.“ He shook his head. “Why didn’t you see me any more, Mal? Why couldn’t you hear what I was telling you? We could have been so happy. I would have done anything to make you happy.” He was crying by now, his eyes red and overflowing.

 

“It’s OK, Cobb,” Arthur said calmly. “She’s just your memory. Tell me what you tried to do for her.”

 

“I showed you our letters. I asked you why you thought what we had could be a dream when it made us feel so much.” He clasped Mallorie’s face in his hands and stared at her, wild eyed. “You had made me so happy, why couldn’t you see it any more? Nothing I said made any difference. You told me I was wrong and that this life was false, that I knew it too. So I made the book for you from the one you were reading to the baby, the story book that had been yours, so that you could always be reminded of what we had and how real it was. I showed you that if you ever doubted how real we were then all you had to do was look inside the covers and our words would be there.”

 

“The book?”

“He must mean the fairytale book,” Ariadne said softly.

 

Mallorie carried on. “The babies were born just before St. Valentine’s. They were beautiful. We had a daughter and a son, just like I’d known we would. Our lives would be wonderful and we’d be everything we wanted to be. But — it was terrible. James was tiny and sickly. He wouldn’t feed properly for his first month and he cried every time he was hungry, then when he couldn’t eat, and then when we tried to give him a bottle. Phillipa was bigger, but she would cry if she wasn’t held enough and James needed so much attention she never was if I was on my own. I was supposed to rest, but I never seemed to be able to. I was angry and sad all the time. With you, with the children, with the life we were living. It wasn’t like the dream we had had, it was a nightmare.” Her voice trembled. “I cried so much. I would shout and scream at you that we had to do what we did before, to make it better. I begged you to help me, to wake me up.”

“Mal, I’m so sorry.”

“You had promised me that we would always be together. All of us. Happy. That was all I wanted, Dom. For us to get out of that terrible dream and be where we were meant to be.”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hurt you. I told you we were going to go back to California, to ask your father and mother to help us.”

“I didn’t want to. I knew where we were meant to be. I knew what we had to do. Why couldn’t you hear me?”

“I wanted you to stay with me. I couldn’t lose you. I didn’t care about anything except you being with me. I couldn’t even care about the kids when I put them next to you. I was selfish and I didn’t give a fuck about anything and then you made me —” He gripped her face tighter, his knuckles going pale.

“Dom, please. You’re hurting me.”

“You never should have made me choose,” he ground out.

“Dom, it was the dream,” she pleaded. “Dom. I love you.”

 

“Cobb, I need you to listen to me very closely.” Arthur said as calmly as he could. “This Mallorie is a projection. You need to tell me what happened to the real Mallorie as clearly as you can.”

 

“The twins were three months old. I came home and found you, breaking a dish to make a sharp edge you could use. We argued and you told me you had to get out. I said, away from me? And you said that if I was the man who loved you I would make sure that we would be where we were meant to be. That I could choose. This life without you. Or that one with you. I told you that there wasn’t a choice. This was our life. So you told me you were going to take the kids too. They deserved better than me. You had Phillipa and I had to get her away from you, you didn’t know what you were saying. So I slapped you across the face as hard as I could. I made your nose bleed.You fell down.” His expression was horrified as Mallorie’s eyes widened. “I took Phillipa from you. I left you sitting on the floor, I went to the bedroom and put her in her crib. I tucked her in and I told her to sleep like a good girl, to have sweet dreams.” He choked and swallowed his words. “Then I heard the glass break. I thought you’d broken the window for the shards, so I ran into the room but you —” He shook his head, unable to make any more sound, staring at Mallorie as she finished for him.

“I jumped. I screamed. You were shouting my name but it was too late. You ran to the window and looked down, and everyone was staring at you. But the one person you wanted to see was lying there dead. You could have gone with me. You could have been strong. But you failed. And I died.”

 

“No.” Ariadne shook her head, breaking in before Arthur could speak. “You knew she was wrong. You wanted to protect your daughter. You did the right thing.” Her voice was firm. “This projection is just saying that because you feel that you should have saved her.”

 

“But he might have. If he had acted faster. Not stayed with Phillipa. Called my father. Not struck me. He doesn’t know. He’s tried every permutation he can think of and it always ends the same way,” Mallorie said sadly. “In a body of data, any marginal piece is seen as an outlier, something that bears only a small significance to the whole and cannot change the overwhelming result. But in the human heart even the smallest notion that something might be different takes on great weight. We call it hope.”

 

“Cobb.” Ariadne lent towards the grief prostrated man. “Cobb, this is not your fault. It wasn’t your fault. You did the best you could at the time. You didn’t know what would happen. You’re a good man.”

 

“But he isn’t.” Mallorie’s hands wove into Cobb’s hair, holding his head up so he was forced to look at her. “He panicked and called my father and told him everything, didn’t you? You didn’t want to go to jail or have James and Phillipa put in a children’s home. So you begged him to help you. He wanted to bury me at home, to be near him and maman, so he said yes. He had General Cobol make everything look perfect. They claimed my body, worked up my accident, and then an ex-army doctor did my autopsy. Nobody ever knew except the five of them. They made it look like Albert Hooper vanished and Dominick Cobb had been at Fort Benning all that time. You ran away like a coward.”

 

“You were grieving,” Ariadne countered. “You were trying to spare her family.”

 

“But that wasn’t the worst thing you did, was it? What did you do with our children? The ones you were trying to protect from me?” Mallorie’s voice rose in fury. “You handed them to my father and told him you wanted nothing to do with them. That he could raise them and that you couldn’t bear to even so much as see them. You agreed to not to go back to Berkeley for a decade at least, because you wanted it that way. My father saw you for what you were and said yes. You left James and Phillipa and went to Los Angeles without a second thought.”

“No, Mal, no. It wasn’t like that,” he protested. “I thought I might end up like you had. I couldn’t hurt them. They were all I had left of you and I wanted them to be safe from me.”

“Liar. You wanted them away from you because they reminded you of me. You couldn’t have me so you decided you didn’t want anyone. They weren’t enough for you and you could not love them knowing that they might have been part of what killed me. You wanted to wallow in your grief,” she accused. “To sink into it like a pig in mud and play at being the broken hearted widower.”

“They were safe with Marie and Stephen. They gave them everything. A good home, clothes, food, toys, an education —”

“— everything except the truth about who they were and that their father was still alive.”

 

“What’s she saying?” Ariadne pushed in.

 

“I made a deal with Stephen. He took James and Phillipa, agreed to my not seeing them and in return he made them part of his family, not mine. Their name was changed to Miles and he told everyone they were his sister’s children, that she had died from cancer in England so they’d come to stay with him. They were registered as US citizens using some false papers that he got from his friend General Cobol and that was that. My children were no longer mine, just like I‘d wanted. I was a free man.” He said bitterly. “But it didn’t make a shred of difference. All I seemed to think of was you and them. Not even moving to Berkeley so I could be closer to them, catch glimpses of them growing up and see how much like us they were. Not even being nearer you made it any easier. Every day for the last fifty five years I have never done anything but wish I had been a better man. That I had followed you and we had lived this life. Now I’m going to make it right. I promised you I we would be happy together and now we can be, for as long as we want.”

 

Arthur felt his mind recoil, Cobb’s grief making him speechless, but Ariadne’s fist banged the table. “No! You can’t do this! You made mistakes and you have regrets, that’s what life is like. You get to be sorry, you get to be hurt, but you are not allowed to drag other people down here to die so you can live in your own twisted little fantasy forever. This woman isn’t Mallorie, those children are not James and Phillipa, and this is not the real world. You can be so much in reality,” she argued, “You could teach or build again. People would want to hear your story. You could meet your children properly. Be a father, a grandfather maybe. You could live a real life.”

“It’s too late for that.” Cobb smiled at Mallorie sadly.

“It isn’t. You can still matter. Don’t do this to yourself.” Ariadne reached across and grabbed his sleeve, forcing his attention onto her. “Come back with us and let me tell your story.”

 

“You would do that for me, wouldn’t you?” He looked from her to Arthur and back. “I really think that you would.” He smiled again. “But the truth is there can be no going back, not for me. I have a heart condition. If the stress of the dream doesn’t kill me, the Somnacin will. This was what I wanted more than anything, the chance to be a young man again, a man who could live his whole life the way it should have been.”

 

“Is he telling the truth?” Ariadne demanded as Arthur stared at Cobb. “What happens to us if he dies?”

 

“Yes, he’s telling the truth,” Arthur said, his mistake looming in his mind as he watched Cobb wrap his arms around Mallorie and press kisses to her face, murmuring something that made her smile in return. He should have stopped and thought, not been so carried away by what Cobb had waved under his nose to ask the right questions. “Age and a heart defect would automatically rule him out of normal clinical use. He dreamt with us knowing it would kill him and that he might trap us here like they were before. Suicide by PASIV.” He was past anger or even disgust with Cobb. All that was left was pity and the desperate need to get himself and Ariadne out of the situation he’d inadvertently helped create. “We could wait for the timer to run down, but that might take years and him dying could trigger a dream collapse. We have to leave the way they did.” He stood up, Ariadne rising to her feet a beat behind him. “Come on.”

 

“We’re going to cut our throats?” She yanked his arm furiously, forcing him to look at her.

“No. This is a city full of tall buildings. We’re going to jump off something.” Arthur gripped her hand as firmly as he could. “I don’t know if it will work but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life down here wondering. OK?” Ariadne tightened her hand around his and nodded, her face set before she turned back to Cobb.

“Come with us,” she appealed. “Don’t let this be the thing that destroys you.”

“It already has,” he said calmly. “I’m happy now. Let me go.”

“Bullshit. You can —”

 

“Leave him. There’s nothing we can do.” Arthur pulled her away, backing towards the door. Outside the sky was clouding over and in the distance a faint rumble shook the air, a building falling or thunder, he couldn’t be sure. “Ariadne, let him go. We have to get out of here.”

 

“Thank you,” Cobb said to her as she backed away. “I’m glad that I had the chance to meet you and show you everything before it was gone. You really are my greatest student. Go with Arthur now. Thank you both.” Mallorie peeked out from the curve of his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she echoed. “Thank you for finding me.”

 

“Come on,” Arthur insisted. “Now, Ariadne, or we’re going to end up like them.”

“This is crazy, we can’t let him die like this.”

“We don’t have a choice. He’s already decided.” Arthur wrenched the door open, feeling it fly back in the rising wind. “He wants to die. We need to live.”

 

He caught one last glimpse of Dominick Cobb, holding Mallorie and his children in his arms. His eyes met Arthur’s, perfect placid blue, calm and unworried as he nodded to him in a final acknowledgement or perhaps even thanks. Arthur nodded back, knowing as well as Cobb did that there was nothing more they could say. He turned away, Ariadne a fraction behind him, her fingers wrapping painfully tight around his as they turned and fled back into the city.

 

* * *

The roof edge is a stark line ruled against the distant city below, a grid marked with roads, patches of dark and light confused by the shapes of the structures inside them. The wind rises up and pulls at them, whipping their clothes and hair and making their eyes weep. Ariadne’s eyes meet his as they stand on the precipice, bodies leaning into the air as he counts down in his head.

 

They step out at the same time. His body feels no resistance as they go; she’s neither ahead nor behind him. The air rushes past them in a banshee shriek, the ground coming up to meet them like an express train. The city blurs but she stays solid. He doesn’t close his eyes when they hit the asphalt: he goes blind in an explosion of pain that seems to last forever. And then he feels nothing but her hand in his as he fades into merciful black.

 

* * *

  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> DoctorArthur Moss is a minor academic writing a comprehensive history of the development of dream sharing therapy in near obscurity when he comes upon some new evidence; evidence that could revive ideas long since dismissed as dangerous impossibilities. In an effort to separate the facts from the fiction he seeks the help of Doctor Ariadne Portier, an expert on the work of the architect Dominick Cobb, and together they begin to uncover secrets that have been hidden for fifty five years: about shared dreams, about the pioneers who created it and a relationship that could rewrite its entire history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings and disclaimers- see chapter one.

~*~

 

Then he woke up.

 

Cobb’s ceiling was as white and distant as clouds, the rug under him ridged and barely comfortable. He could hear himself breathing, his heart thumping defiantly in his ears, and above that the sea hitting the shore on the beach outside. Seabirds were calling in high, thin shrieks and the room was dim; the air smelt of salt and ozone, metallic with a warning of bad weather to come. He sat up as fast as he could, pulling the cuff free from his arm as he went.

 

Ariadne was lying on her side on the couch, her beautiful face sad and elated as she reached out to him. “We’re alive,” she said quietly as he captured her hand and pressed it to his face. She was warm and real.

 

“Yes,” he replied, putting a kiss into the centre of her palm. “Yes, we are.”

 

* * *

The storm rolled in from the sea that afternoon and stayed, taking out the power lines and all but cell communications. The owner of the small guest house where they were staying said ruefully that they normally blew themselves out over the bay, but that this one was one of the bad ones, as if somehow she was to blame for the weather turning. She talked about the spring current, pressure changes and the dangers of living by water as she boiled water by candlelight, the house groaning and rattling around them in the wind and the rain. Her children had eagerly dragged out the emergency boxes from the cellar and offered him one packed with candy bars, candles, bottled water, and a torch like it was Christmas come early. Their host rolled her eyes with a smile and apologised, sending them to build a camp in their dining room as she brewed coffee and toasted bread for Arthur to take upstairs and share with Ariadne.

 

“You’re not in a hurry to leave are you?” she said with a smile.

“No.” Arthur shook his head as he accepted the tray from her. “We’ll be here a little while longer.”

 

Not that he much wanted to be, but since they had reported Cobb’s death they were both required to remain in the state of California pending the coroner’s hearing. An earnest young police officer in a crisp new uniform had explained this to him after he’d given his statement, explained why he had a PASIV and Somnacin vials in his possession, and produced the documentation showing his academic credentials and his right to have and use the aforementioned medical equipment. He’d explained in deep and careful detail to the coroner’s assistant that he had failed to ask Dominick Cobb if he had any medical conditions that would make him unsuitable to participate in a shared dream, that Ariadne was in no way implicated, and that he bore the burden of any guilt they chose to ascribe aside from Cobb’s in choosing to enter the state willingly and in that full knowledge. He’d let them take the PASIV away with them, knowing full well that by tomorrow his department head would be kicking his ass via his cell phone for getting himself into such a mess, but somehow it hardly seemed to register.

 

He’d sat quietly as they interviewed Ariadne, listening to her insist over and over that this was Dominick Cobb, that this had been something he’d done with deliberate intent, and that she was prepared to swear on any thing they liked that he’d admitted as much to both of them, never mind what her current visa status was.

 

He sipped bad coffee from a paper cup as he watched Cobb’s body zipped into a body bag, placed gently on a gurney, and wheeled to the waiting ambulance. He’d taken the lead from his wrist earlier while Ariadne stood at Cobb’s other side, pressed his fingers to the jugular and then the radial pulse before he nodded to her. She had blinked slowly once, then gently arranged Cobb’s hands in his lap and turned away, picking up her cell and dialling. Her voice rose and fell behind him as he stared down at the body of Dominick Cobb. Left alone he felt as if he should say something, deliver some last rites or commend the man’s soul to whatever God might have a claim on it. Instead he felt his mouth twist up in a wry, humourless smile and said the first thing that came into his mind. “Well done, you selfish, fucked up, brilliant son of a bitch,” he told the corpse. “Well done.”

 

“What was that?” Ariadne said from across the room.

 

“Nothing,” Arthur replied calmly, adding half to himself. “Just sending him on his way.”

 

* * *

He took the tray and climbed up the stairs in the dark, letting his eyes adjust to the thin glow of light coming from the landing windows. Ariadne’s door was closed so he balanced the tray on his knee and knocked softly. “Ariadne? I’ve got some food and coffee,” he added for good measure.

 

The door opened and she was framed in it, wearing a pair of over sized flannel pyjamas and towelling her hair dry. “I washed it in the basin. I know we didn’t really go in the ocean or get caught in a hurricane, but it felt dirty,” she said explained before he could ask. “Come in.”

 

They sat cross legged on her bed, facing each other, eating buttered toast and drinking the dark coffee by the scattered light of the candles on the dresser. Arthur couldn’t recall ever having eaten better. The sour yeast of the crisp bread smothered in the salt and rich milky fat of the melting butter filled his stomach with a warm contentment, topped with mouthfuls of the roast smokiness in the coffee. His body was here, real, and hungry as flesh should be.

 

Ariadne wolfed down two slices as quickly as him, then sat back. “Why am I so hungry? It seems obscene after what happened.” She looked at him.

“It’s a natural response in the face of death. To reaffirm that you’re alive by doing what the living do.” Arthur pushed the plate towards her. “We also haven’t eaten since breakfast,” he added pointedly as she took another piece.

 

They ate in silence a while longer. Arthur tried to refrain from staring at her, but in the end he gave up and looked up from his plate.

 

“You’re going to be famous,” he said seriously. “You can tell Cobb’s story completely now. You can work anywhere you want. Anyone would have you.”

She looked back at him, her eyes firmly on his.

“We. We are going to do this together. We’re going to take it to James and Phillipa and tell them, then we’re going to let them help us decide what to tell the world. This is their family’s story.” She stopped abruptly, then took a deep breath. “Do you remember — you asked me why I never went into a shared dream before I started working with you and I told you I didn’t want to open my mind to anyone. I lied to you.”

 

Arthur waited for her to go on before he asked gently, “Why?”

“My dad died when I was eleven. I missed him so much for so long, people said I should try dream therapy so I could see him again. But I knew once would never be enough. I would keep wanting to be there, say all the things that I had never said, do all the things we should have. I would have been like Cobb, making the past over and over while the present got flushed down the drain, so I kept it in a corner of myself, trying to carry on as if it was OK and feeling like I was betraying him if I did. Until one night I had a dream about my dad, so strong it was like I was with him. He told me that he loved me, so I should live. Life is for the living, he said. So live.”

Arthur put his hand out, holding her cheek as he touched his thumb to the end of her eyebrow, the corner of her eye, the curve of her nose and mouth. “You were right,” he said.

 

“How is this going to be?” She lent into his touch. “I suck at relationships, and it feels like I always have. I can’t be the kind of person who makes half of a whole, joined at the hip all the time, buying curtains, and baking cakes. I need space to breathe and be myself, and it makes people think I’m being a standoffish bitch on purpose.”

“I don’t do much better.” He closed his eyes for a moment as her hand came up to his face and cupped his jaw.

“You’re OK with me,” she offered.

“And you are with me. What does that tell you?” The wind howled under the roof and somewhere near by trees shook and sighed, creaked and broke.

 

“That we can be what we are with each other, maybe. That we can have what we need, not what other people looking over our shoulders or from a distance think we should want, and be happy in our own way. I don’t want to be alone —”

“Do you want to be with me?” He felt her smile under his touch.

“Yes, but — I’m afraid. God, that’s so pathetic. I don’t want to end up being destroyed like they were. I just want to us to do this and not end up screwing each other over. I want to be with you, but not at any risk, not at any cost. And I’m saying that but now I’m not even sure if I wouldn’t throw everything away and follow you into chaos. I already did twice because it was where you were going, not just because I had to see what was there.”

 

Arthur swallowed against the dryness in his throat and exhaled shakily. “I can’t tell you not be afraid, because you scare the crap out of me sometimes too. This, right now, scares the living shit out of me.” Ariadne laughed quietly as he carried on, bringing their faces closer together. “I can’t tell you that we won’t hurt each other or fuck up somehow. But I know we can work everything out between the two of us. I just want to be with you too. That’s all I can think of that matters right here and right now. I watched you die twice today. I can’t stop thinking of how it felt to feel you stop breathing, to stop living, and never having been close enough to hold you until then. I want to be with you, Ariadne. I want to feel you alive and close to me. I want to know that this is real. That we are real.” She stopped, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her skin and the motion of her breath across his face.

 

“Arthur?” she said softly against the noise of the storm, of the house moving and his body pulling towards hers.

“Yes?”

Her mouth moved over his, the shape of the words crossing his skin with a shiver. “Let’s go to bed.”

 

* * *

He had half expected her to turn her back when they undressed. Instead Ariadne faced him, her eyes on his as she unbuttoned her pyjama shirt and slid it off, disturbing her hair so it trailed over her shoulders and dropped in loose curls across her breasts. He reciprocated, pulling off his sweater and undoing his shirt, trying to keep his hands from fumbling as he unnotched his belt and stripped down to his underwear. He put his hands on his waistband to finish but before he could her cool hands found the elastic and by association his skin. She worried and tugged at his briefs, her touch warming against him as she freed him, working them to his knees then letting them fall to his ankles so he could kick them away. One hand spread low on his stomach, the other on his right thigh making him jump as she began to smooth his skin, working away from his erection in slow curves that meandered and dawdled over him.

 

He struggled to concentrate for a few seconds, but somehow he reached out and yanked down her pyjama pants. He settled both hands on her lower spine as she backed him up to the bed so when he sat he pulled her forwards, body to body, face to face and finally he kissed her, not as a man facing his death, not as a farewell to her on hers, but as one lover kisses another. She grasped his shoulders as he fell back against the bed, his hands splaying around her rib cage so he could feel her heart beating like a hammer inside her; she’s alive, so alive that he nearly broke down with stupid joy. Feeling her heart shifted perfectly logically to palming her breasts. They were small and soft, except when her nipples pressed into his hands and she gasped through their kiss, pushing her hips down onto his thigh as he stroked them. Her fingertips grazed over his chest in return and when she touched him over the same spot his body went up to meet hers, arcing from his pelvis as he rained kisses on to her skin.

 

Time became elastic, spreading out in a ripple with them at the centre. The sheets were cool against his skin, the storm was loud and making the house shake, but Ariadne was warm, wrapping around him with her exploring hands and eager mouth, tangling limbs with him as they touched and tasted each other. All he could hear was her, saying his name with her mouth against his ear. Crying it out when he slid his tongue over her pussy to taste her, grasping her ankles as she held her legs wide for him. Or when he suckled at her breasts, filling his mouth with her, her arms wrapped around his head to hold him close, tangling her fingers in his hair. “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur,” she panted and demanded. “Oh my God, Arthur.” All he can feel is her, a silky motion of hair, skin, mouth, and sex that made his chest heave as his body gave in. Her small, clever hands stroking his cock made his toes curl in delight. Her nails tracing over his chest sent out sparks where his nerves ignited and her mouth, her blissful mouth sealed over his erection to take the small drops she’s coaxed from inside him made the world blur and collapse behind his eyes as he grasped at the slithery mass of her hair.

 

Her name tumbled out of him with each fresh discovery, “Ariadne,” over and over as they dissolved in a storm of kisses. Nothing else seemed right. She wasn’t a baby, honey, or sweetheart, not his darling or his angel. She could have been all of things in some part, but above all she was herself, and the sweetest endearment he could offer was to see her as she is. Every other word seemed redundant when she was teaching him her own private vocabulary of moans, gasps and sighs, when her eyes found his and he saw into her, again and again. _This isn’t the end of intimacy_ , he realised in a beautiful shock when she lent over and hid them both under the waterfall of her hair to bless him with more kisses, _this is the beginning_. Dreams were nothing to this: they’re dead, pale, the action of the mind without the body. All his life he’d been chasing something that can’t be caught, trying to decode it, put labels on it and find out what makes it go. It had taken him thirty years to realise that knowing isn’t as important as being. That he could break them down to their atoms, their neurochemistry and their social conditioning, their urge to reproduce and perpetuate the species, he could subtract him from her and there would still be something left over.

 

Ariadne felt him smile under her and she lifted her head a fraction. “What are you thinking?” He told her and she chuckled. “What do you think would be left over, Arthur?” He looked at her, felt her in his hands, tried to encompass the feeling of being with someone who lets him be as he is, makes him want be better, brighter and stronger just because she is, who has stayed with him through death no matter how unreal, and takes the risk. Language is clumsy and inadequate but it’s all he’s got, so he tells the truth as best he can.

 

“Love,” he said simply. “I think what would be left is love.” Her body stilled over him, his hands curved over the pillows of her cute backside as she examined him through the tangled mass of her hair.

“I think,” she conceded seriously, slowly, her body moving to cover him with infinite care, “I think that you could be right.”

 

The sun was rising when she took him inside her. She sat above him in the dawn light, one hand guiding him, the other woven into the fingers of one of his. Her heat and grip around him were so good that his fingers clenched into her hand, his shoulders pushing back as his body moved upwards, letting her rise with him then fall back, engulfing him as she let her hips drop. Her eyes closed, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she exhaled with a huge smile and he couldn’t bear it: he lifted himself up on his elbows and pulled her down for a kiss, nipping at her mouth as she settled, her body opening for him until she began to slip backward with a small _ahh_.

 

He was beneath her body, but he was moving as he encouraged her up and down with a hand on her hip. She was letting him carry her but she was setting the tempo as she rolled herself over him. She pinned their joined hands to the bed next to them, fingers meshed together. His free hand roamed over her, from her hip to her breasts and back, then up to her face, bringing her head down to his as she curled over him, holding him in the curve of her body until his body began to tense under her, the need too great for him to ignore.

 

His hips rose, rolling them both over so she was under him, she practically purred his name and that made it overpowering: he was all motion and no direction all at once. They clung to each other, her head turned so they were forehead to forehead, his mouth bare fractions of an inch from hers. Her free hand was between them and a low guttural growl came from her throat as she touched herself and he filled her; he was a mass of heat, sweat and feeling but at the core was her, taking him with her, making him want and letting him be satisfied. He said her name as the feeling expanded inside him, because there wasn’t anything now but her. She replied in kind, pulling him down as the bed trembled like the ocean. Just as everything inside him began to tip over her eyes opened wide, catching his in their insistent gaze and she breathed his name back to him. Joy, satisfaction and triumph filled her voice as she grabbed hold of his too willing body and took him down with her.

 

* * *

They slept back to back, like twins in the womb, but she came and lay in his arms as they woke up. The sky was still full of cloud fragments, thin and drained of rain.

The air smelt of the sea, like freshness and change, Arthur decided quietly as he kissed the fragile pulse at Ariadne’s temple.

 

* * *

  
Epilogue: _Entre Nous_

1955

 

Mallorie Miles sat down on the bed, took off her shoes and rubbed the balls of her feet, straining around the curve of her belly to reach. She had walked in the park today to get some fresh air and space for herself and the babies, then taken the bus up to campus and visited the university library, and now she had two hours before Dom came home to do a little reading and some writing.

 

She loved Dom and she loved that she was with him, even if she couldn’t shake the nagging doubts that seemed to cloud her mind some days. But she cherished the time she had to herself, to read, to think and try to gain traction on the ideas that sometimes crowded her head to bursting.

 

She had once told him that his first word in French should be boudoir. “As in bedroom?”

“No, as in the room a lady withdraws to to sulk in private with her foibles.” She pouted and he laughed.

“Why you want to do that?”

“Everyone likes to sulk now and then. Even me.”

“Not you,” he’d said, gathering her to him. “You’re too perfect to sulk.”

 

“So, what would you like today?” She patted her stomach. “ _Scientific American_ or _Nature_? I’m interested in the research study into sucrose esters but you might prefer the work on nuclear fuels. Any preference?” A thump against her abdominal wall made her smile. “Alright, let’s see what Signor Fermi and his friends are doing, shall we?”

 

She opened the journal and started to read.

~*~

1966

 

James knew the ball was going to hit the man on the bench a second after he kicked it. He watched helplessly as it arced away, hitting the man’s knee and making him start. James ran over as the man captured the ball in his hand and looked around him.

 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to hit you,” James panted as the man regarded him with a thoughtful expression. “Sir, I was playing with my sister. It was an accident.”

 

“We’re both sorry, really. Please may we have our ball?” Phillipa said in a small voice from over his shoulder. The man looked at them, then held the golden ball out in his hand. James took it from him, then he said quite unexpectedly:

 

“Do you like fairy stories?”

“I do,” Phillipa said before James could answer. “Uncle Stephen is reading us Greek Myths at the moment, which are just as good, but I miss fairy tales.”

“And you?” He looked at James, a kind smile on his face. He had blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled, just like Uncle Miles’, and blond hair like Pippa’s.

“I like them too, I guess,” James replied shyly.

“I happen to have a book of them with me today to read. But I think they sound better read out loud. I had a friend who used to read them out loud and it reminds me of them. Would you mind if I read to you?”

 

James looked at his sister, who nodded. “OK.” Phillipa took a seat on the bench with the man and James settled on his other side.

“Do you have a favourite?” he asked James quietly.

“ _Sleeping Beauty_ ,” he said, then added quickly, “I like the wicked fairy and the prince hacking through the briars.”

“That’s a good choice,” the man said. He opened the book on his knee and cleared his throat.

 

“ _Once upon a time there was a King and Queen who were happy in every way, save one..._ ”

 

When the story was done he insisted that he gift the book to James. Unsure what to do but raised never to be rude to adults, he accepted, carried it home carefully and put it on his bookcase is his new room. He’d moved into it just the week before and even though Pippa was his sister, he liked having a space of his own for his things. His globe and star maps as well as his microscope and books about minerals and birds were exactly where he wanted them, not crammed cheek by jowl with her novels and drawings so he barely had room to look at them. The novelty of being able to put something of his own where he liked was still fresh and exciting then, so the book was a delight for that. But James was growing past fairy tales, a fact he had been scared to admit to the man when he offered him the gift, so even though he sometimes passed over it on his way to another volume with a small pang of guilt, he never opened it himself. Which made it a something of relief that although he and Pippa played at the park again, they never saw the man after that.

 

He kept the red book on his shelf until he left for college, when he handed it to his Uncle Stephen to give to someone who it might suit better. He never saw what had been written on the end papers that his uncle had so carefully peeled open or why he had insisted James tell him where the book had come from. The memory of the park and the man were vague, so he told the truth as best he could. “I must have found it in my room. It was our cousin Mal’s room, right?”

 

Stephen looked at the book in his hands and said nothing for a long moment. “Yes. Yes it was,” he eventually admitted, and put the book on his desk gently before he raised his head with a small smile. “On your way past the kitchen please tell your aunt I’d like a chocolate cake for tomorrow.”

 

James gratefully left his uncle’s study and the subject of the book never came up again.

~*~

1995

 

“This room is yours.” Eames opened the door, flicked on the lights and let Yusuf follow him inside. There was a bed, an arm chair with a small table next to it holding a reading lamp, and a desk in front of a wide window looking out over the garden and the sea beyond. “You have an ensuite bathroom and a walk in wardrobe closet thing too.” Eames fidgeted with the doors. “We can change the decor if you like. Or you can pick another if you really hate it, I mean this house has five guest rooms so there’s bound to be one you like.” He smiled nervously.

 

“No, no. This is very pleasant. It must be very beautiful during the day,” Yusuf said more out of politeness than anything else. He put his small case on the desk and looked around him.

“So, I’ll just let you get settled in.” Eames made to back out of the room.

 

“Why did you this?” Yusuf turned suddenly, the question that had been on his mind since he’d arrived from Kenya coming to life. “If it was just to rekindle our romance —” he waved his hands dramatically “— then why aren’t I in your room? Why aren’t you seducing me like you used to, when it was so bloody dangerous but we didn’t care? Or do you feel guilty about Sanari and you want to take care of me?” Eames winced at his tone. “Is that it?”

 

“No. Look.” He came back towards Yusuf and took one of his hands in his, rubbing his thumb over his wrist. “We’re both alone now. Eve died last year just after Sanari did. Beth and Oliver have been grown up and gone for years. I loved Eve, Yusuf, I really did. But I also loved you. I also love you,” he corrected himself. “I love you. But I also know that I’m a bastard to live with sometimes and that you might think there was something a little undignified about us being intimate after all this time or that you might not even want to. So I thought you might like a space to call your own so that you can really say this is your home too. Because it is and I want you to be happy here.”

 

He watched Eames face, so full of hope and raw emotion, as he turned his hand in his grasp and brought it up to his lips, pressing a kiss to the back.

“Thank you,” he said gently. “Would you mind if I put up a picture of Sanari and Museeb?”

“Not at all,” Eames replied. “This room is yours. You can have whomever you like in here. Maybe even me,” he added with a wide grin.

~*~

2011

 

Ariadne’s mom said it was a waste of space and money.

Arthur’s mom and dad said it was ridiculous.

Even Arthur himself was prepared to admit that to some people the idea of them occupying two separate apartments, one above the other, when he and Ariadne were in a settled, committed, and above all loving and happy relationship, made about as much sense as them speaking two different languages or eating at separate tables in a restaurant. Some would warm to the topic, further mentioning that they had to live in the wrong part of Brooklyn, it was selfish when space in the city was at a premium, surely they didn’t enjoy having two sets of bills, two lots of laundry to do, and groceries to buy and wouldn't it be, well, easier just to live together?

 

So he would put down his glass or his cup, put his hands in his pockets and smile before informing his interrogator in a calm, placid voice that he and Ariadne liked it so he didn’t give a fuck. (Although, admittedly not to either of their parents. He used the word damn instead. He’d also taken great pleasure in finishing one version of it by punching Nash in the mouth when he asked if who was on top was a consistent thing in all areas.)

 

In reality it was remarkably simple, despite what anyone thought. They could come and go between each other’s spaces with as much ease as they wanted. They could share meals, beds, baths, and movies — or not. They could work separately, pushing ideas back and forth via notes scrawled in margins or post its, or together, arguing the toss over coffee and bagels, pizza and beer, or ice cream and hot chocolate. Arthur liked that on the days they worked separately he could hear her moving around her apartment above him, not needing any more than the sound of her to feel her close. He liked that she would crawl into his bed on nights when he thought she might want to sleep alone and he would wake up to feel her spine against his or her hair against his skin. That they cooked for each other, albeit shyly at first. They held hands. That given a choice they could be separate or close, and they chose to be close more often than not. The things that they shared were so utterly precious that each one made him grateful and happy, in a way he hadn't been since he was small. Instead of being one whole they were two objects in close sympathetic orbit, crossing and interweaving paths in their own private pattern, coming closer by degrees as they wanted. They're here, and they are enough. 

 

Shortly after Cobb’s inquest, when they were trying to settle things with his department head and smooth things over with hers, along with deciding where they were going to finish their work, who would commute, and who would have rights over what, a box of papers arrived from California addressed to Ariadne, care of his office at Columbia. She had opened the letter that came with it and read it twice while he made coffee and tried not to let his curiosity eat him up.

 

“Well.” She had put the letter down on his desk and looked at him.

“What?”

“Cobb willed me some things.” Her eyes sparkled as she smiled. “Want to have a look?” She lifted the box up and put it in front of them, waiting for him to hand her her coffee before she tapped her mug against his in a salute.

 

“Here’s to Cobb and Mallorie.” He smiled back, then lent across the desk and kissed her before he added, “And here’s to us.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N's-
> 
> I owe an enormous debt of thanks (which I may never repay) to both bennet_7 and cunning_croft both of who have managed very patiently and tolerantly to beta while I was going nuts at my ISP, my mobile hard drive and more usually and generally myself. If there is any good in this then it also belongs to them. (All the mistakes are mine though.)
> 
> I also greatly thank the mods of inception_bang for being generally excellent, not at all frigtening and for taking the time and effort to create the challenge. I've very much enjoyed doing it :)
> 
> I am not the owner of the following and hereby happily state that I am using these names without permission but I get no money for writing this, so...yeah:
> 
> The Dice Man is by Luke Rhinehart.  
> Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.  
> There's also a very sly mention of Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want (copyright to J. Marr/S. Morrisey, Rough Trade, 1984)
> 
> Columbia University & The Schermerhorn are roughly as located, although I don't know enough about their psychology department to tell you if Arthur's office is accurate (although I can tell you that: "The vending machines on floor 2 [of the Schermerhorn] have an awesome array of beverages" - courtesy of Foursquare). Cafe Amrita is at 301 West 110th Street, New York (I once had a very nice latte there, although sadly I failed to mention it's awesomeness on Foursquare.)  
> Fort Benning, Georgia is the home of the US Army Infantry School and the US Army Armour School; McLean hospital is in Belmont, Massachusetts and has treated (amongst others) Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. St. Joseph's cemetery is also located approximately as stated. The Ronald Williams Library at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago does hold some of the state records for Cook County & Chicago, although it doesn't really work as I've implied. Just in case anyone is wondering, it looks like this . 
> 
> The inspiration for Mal's scientific bent came from the chronically under appreciated Rosalind Franklin and Enrico Fermi did work at the University of Chicago at the period stated.  
> Mal's autopsy is based on this excellent article and Arthur's little tidbit about Chicago's beauty is based on this article
> 
> Fox Mulder and (Dana) Scully are the property of Chris Carter/Ten Thirteen/20th Century Fox. I also freely reinterpreted the line "We leave for the very plausible state of Oregon at eight a.m." (The X Files, Pilot ) for my own nefarious ends.
> 
> Palm to Palm/Is Holy Palmers' Kiss is from Romeo and Juliet (I.5. 99 )  
> "Stately homo" [s] is an expression coined by the much missed Quentin Crisp.  
> [they're words for]..." experiences, not people ." Is from Gore Vidal on sexuality. 
> 
> Operating detail for the PASIV is as stated in the shooting script, save Arthur's comments on how it and dreams work, which are speculation on my part. His comments on vitalism v. mechanism come from a lecture given by one of my former tutors, the very nice Roger Gossett.


End file.
